The franchise for Tyne and Wear in the top-tier British Basketball League, which became the most successful club in the history of the sport in this country dates back more than five decades.
ORIGINS IN SUNDERLAND
Newcastle Eagles’ origins lay in nearby Sunderland where in the summer of 1973 when owner Dave Elderkin established the business entity that took the club up from the Yorkshire Premier League to the England Central League.
As the business of basketball in the region developed by 1976 the EPAB Sunderland club progressed to National League Division Two, later becoming the Sunderland Sunblest as sponsorship deals helped boost the franchise’s growth to attract better talent to the North East.
It was as the Sunblest hailing from a home court of Sunderland’s Crowtree Leisure Centre that the club took it’s first venture into European competition in 1978. Six years later the franchise drew the then reigning European champions, Sarajevo, in the knockout stages of the continent’s leading club competition with a capacity crowd that could have been sold three times over as the story goes.
The club also played in Washington at the Northumbria Centre under various monikers throughout the 80s and early 90s, managing a second place league finish in 1983, as well as two play-off victories at Wembley in ‘81 & ’83.
MOVE TO TYNESIDE
The miners’ strike of the 1980s and recession of the early 90s contributed to serious financial pressures, and after steering Sunderland through those difficult years, Elderkin was approached by the owners of Newcastle’s new arena with a view to moving the franchise north of the Tyne, which it did in 1995 to be known as the Newcastle Comets.
Soon afterwards the club was bought by Sir John Hall, then the chairman of Newcastle United, adding them to his Sporting Group of the city’s football, ice hockey and rugby teams.
The final name change, from the Comets to the Eagles, joining the Sporting Club’s bird theme of Magpies and Falcons in 1996.
NEW OWNERSHIP
Former Sunderland and Comets player Ken Nottage had become chief executive of the Newcastle United Sporting Club and when the group was dissolved in 1999 Nottage joined together with Paul Blake to take over as the Eagles’ new owners.
Throughout the 2000s, the club started to cement its legacy as under head coach Tony Garbelotto challenging for silverware for the first time since moving to Tyneside. The Eagles came within touching distance a title, just losing out in the fourth quarter against the Chester Jets, in the 2001 Uni-ball Trophy final.
Garbelotto moved to the Birmingham Bullets in the summer of 2002, replaced by his newest signing in New York native Fabulous Flournoy.
FABULOUS ERA OF SUCCESS
The trophy cabinet remained bare until the 2004-05 season when, under the leadership of player-coach Flournoy, over a decade of success began.
Newcastle Eagles’ first title under Feb was aptly against Nick Nurse’s Brighton Bears on their own court in the 2005 BBL Trophy. Nurse had brough Flournoy to the UK in 1996 and the two would be reunited on the same team many years later when Fab left the UK to join his former coach on the sidelines in the NBA.
Lifting the coveted Trophy vase in ‘05 followed by a first Play-Offs victory against Chester that post-season tipped-off a prolonged period of success that has never been eclipsed in British basketball.
THE CLEAN SWEEP
A year later history books would be rewritten as the club achieved a first-ever “clean sweep” of all four trophies, lifting the 2006 in-season Trophy and Cup competition titles followed by the league Championship and Play-Offs wins.
Flournoy picked up the BBL Coach of the Year 2025 with former Villanova Wildcat, Drew Sullivan voted BBL Player of the Year.
In that extra special season for the team Flournoy, Sullivan and Andrew Bridge were members of the bronze medal winning England team in the 2006 Commonwealth Games that March.
Away from the court the 2005-06 season also saw the highest record attendance for an Eagles home game with 7,150 supporters packed into the Metro Radio Arena for a regular season home game against the Birmingham Bullets with over a thousand ticketless supporters turned away on the door.
NEW SIGNINGS
At the start of the 2007-08 season it was announced that sponsorship deals had been signed with Nike and Northern Rock, bringing in more money to the club. Success in the league followed with three seasons of back-to-back league title wins.
In the 2008-09 season the Eagles were strengthened by the signing of Trey Moore from Cheshire Jets and after an indifferent start, the club embarked on a 17-game winning run to become the first team for nearly two decades to retain the league title, finishing 8 points ahead of Everton Tigers.
The Eagles had their hopes of another clean-sweep dashed by a semi-finals exit of the BBL Cup and the hands of the Tigers on aggregate before getting revenge by beating them home and away in the BBL Trophy semis.
It was a treble-winning campaign for the sealed by a 87–84 win over Tigers in the post-season to cap off the club’s most successful year since the clean sweep.
In the 2009-10 season the Eagles yet again retained the league title, finishing just two points ahead of Sheffield Sharks. The league title actually came down to the last game of the season with Sheffield Sharks losing their final tip-off 97–95 to Worthing Thunder thanks to Evaldas Zabas’ basket 4 seconds from the end. This completed the double for the Eagles who had won the BBL Trophy by beating 115–95 in the Final.
MAKING MOVES
At the start of the 2010-11 season it was announced that the Esh Group, along with partners Northumbria University and Northumbrian Water would be the new main sponsors of the Eagles.
That summer the club also announced that it would be moving ‘nest’, from its founding home at Newcastle Arena to Northumbria University’s new Sport Central facility on the city centre campus.
Despite appearances in all three semi-finals, the 2010-11 season was the first in six years of success without a single piece of silverware for the Eagles who would regroup and return a year later to repeat their feat of ’06.
Season 2012-13, although successful, bore no trophies but did see a visit to Wembley Arena for the first time in Eagles club history, in the BBL Play-Off Final against an emerging Leicester Riders. Leicester won out that day, in what was a turning point event for the BBL. The visit was repeated a year later, only for the result to remain the same as the Eagles fell to Worcester Wolves, all was not lost though as the team clinched its sixth BBL Championship title.
The 2013-14 campaign ended with the Eagles as Champions, claiming a record sixth league title, but unable to make it more than one piece of silverware being defeated in both the Cup and Play-Off Finals.
Flournoy’s Eagles achieved a hat-trick of clean-sweeps in 2014-15. That season also saw a then 39-year-old Charles Smith take the BBL Player of the Season title.
The Eagles’ performance programmes’ domination didn’t end there with it’s feeder side Team Northumbria University men’s programme crowned British University and College Sports (BUCS) Champions and the women’s programme coming runners-up.
Starting another page in the history books, as the British Basketball League continued to grow nationally, the 2015 BBL Play-Off Final moved from Wembley to take place at London’s O2 Arena in front of a British basketball record breaking crowd of 15,000 in attendance.
BUILDING UP TO A NEW VENUE
From 2015 through to 2019 the club was full steam ahead with plans to build its own home in the West End of Newcastle.
During this period the trophies kept rolling in with back to back BBL Cup wins against Leicester Riders (2015-16) and Glasgow Rocks (2016-17). Although the 2017-18 and 2018-19 seasons were trophyless, the team came top three both seasons, taking the number of consecutive years in the top three to 15 seasons.
In 2018, following Northumbria University’s decision to focus on academic sports programmes, the club took the city’s Women’s British Basketball League (WBBL) franchise under its wing to secure the future of the top-flight female game on Tyneside. This marked the start of the club’s mission to grow the women’s franchise and its fanbase, building on the success of its men’s team, as well as developing opportunities for female players across the region with the soon to open new home as its base.
WELCOME HOME
January 2019 saw the club move from Sports Central to its new home, the Eagles Community Arena, a project 10-years in the making, standing proudly on the banks of the River Tyne on the famous Scotswood Road.
COACH FAB MOVES TO THE NBA – MACLEOD TAKES CHARGE
The club’s talisman player-coach Fab Flournoy made the move from Newcastle after almost 20 years and 24 trophies to the NBAs Toronto Raptors to reunite with the now Raptors head coach and BBL legend Nick Nurse, who recruited him to the Birmingham Bullets in the early 90s.
Eagles assistant coach Ian MacLeod took the reigns for the 2019-20 season in the new venue and, in a season that was cut short by COVID, won the BBL Trophy in what was the final game of the season, taking the clubs trophy tally to 25 in 15 seasons.
EAGLES DO THE DOUBLE AGAIN
MacLeod’s team kept the foot on the gas into the 2020-21 season led by Eagles legends Rahmon Fletcher and Darius Defoe. The Eagles conquered London Lions in the BBL Cup and BBL Play-Off Final to record a historic double.
Darius Defoe clicked to 27 trophy wins, making him the most decorated player in BBL history, overtaking Eagles legend Fabulous Flournoy by one trophy.
THE INTRODUCTION OF GB HEAD COACH MARC STEUTEL
Since February 2019 the home of Newcastle Eagles had also become the venue of choice for the Great Britain national team.
The Eagles Community Arena, later renamed the Vertu Motors Arena in a ground-breaking naming-rights sponsorship by the long-time club partner, has welcomed powerhouse nations from the world of basketball seven times for FIBA EuroBasket and World Cup competition tip-offs, including:
- Germany – 2023 World Cup Champions
- Serbia – 2023 Word Cup Runners Up
- Latvia – led by NBA-star Kristaps Porzingis
- Turkey – with EuroLeague MVP Shane Larkin
- Greece – the first time GB had beaten Greece since 1984
- Belgium
- Netherlands
It was whilst on the sidelines for GB as acting-head coach that Marc Steutel would go full-circle on his hoops journey to realise his long-held dream of leading the Eagles, stepping up to the head coach’s role, having assisted Fab Flournoy in the 2009-10 season.
TOSAN EVBOUMWAN’S JOURNEY TO THE NBA
Since the formation of the Eagles Community Foundation in 2006, the whole Eagles performance pathway structure continued to develop and see a broadening range of successes and growth, much like the top-tier men’s and women’s franchises.
A recent Eagles Academy graduate Tosan Evboumwan excelled in his Eagles journey, representing England and GB at age group level along the way. His endeavours earned him a scholarship to Princeton, which culminated in a 2023 NCAA March Madness tournament run in his senior year, taking the ivy-league college side to the Sweet Sixteen.
Evboumwan entered the NBA Draft in the summer of 2023 and narrowly missed out on a contract, failing to emerge as one of last summer’s top 60 picks.
The day after the draft, the Detroit Pistons signed Tosan, who then appeared in their Motor City Cruise G-League roster.
In early 2024, Tosan became the first Geordie and Eagles Academy player to play in the NBA when the Memphis Grizzlies signed him on a 10-day contract. Immediately impressing on the floor, the Pistons signed him back to an NBA contract.
On 20 March 2024, Tosan realised a dream in becoming a starting player in an NBA game for the Pistons against the Indiana Pacers – the beginning of a new journey.
FLYING INTO EUROPE
In the summer of 2023, shortly after unveiling Seriös Group as the club’s new naming-rights partner, the Eagles announced that European basketball would be back in the region for the first time in 33-years when, when the Sunderland Saints, the franchise faced Greece’s PAOK in the 1990–91 FIBA European Cup Winners’ Cup.
Over the course of the 2023-24 season playing in the European North Basketball League competition, the Eagles travelled to Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania and its Vertu Motors Arena home welcomed teams from Belgium, Czechia, Denmark and Poland.
In March 2024 the club announced it will be flying into ENBL action again next season when it looks to build on the success of reaching the 2024 Play-Offs in both European and British Basketball League action.
Notable Former Players
- Fabulous Flournoy – McNeese State
- Darius Defoe – BBL Most Successful Player
- Niki Arinze – Wake Forest
- Olu Babalola – Clemson
- Stedroy Baker – England International
- Flinder Boyd – Dartmouth
- Tony Dorsey – North Alabama
- Jeremy Hyatt – NC State
- Steve Leven – Auburn
- Richard Midgley – California (Cal)
- Trey Moore – Mississippi State
- Shawn Myers – West Georgia
- Peter Scantlebury – England International, BBL Hall of Fame inductee
- Lynard Stewart – Temple
- Andrew Sullivan – Villanova
- Ralph Blalock – Delaware State
- Leon McGee – West Michigan
- Mark Boyd – USC
- Ian Whyte – England International
- Shahid Perkins – Delaware State
- Andrew Mavis – Canada National Team
- Rob Phelps – Providence
- Chris Fite – Rochester
- Scott Wilke – Colorado
- Charles Smith – Rider
- Scott Martin – Notre Dame (captain)
- Joe Chapman – Marquette
- Andy Thomson – England / GB International
- Paul Gause – Seton Hall
- Reggie Jackson – Duquesne
- Rahmon Fletcher – Wisconsin Green Bay
Head Coaches
- 1995-1997 Tom Hancock
- 1997-2000 Craig Lynch
- 2000-2002 Tony Garbelotto
- 2002-2019 Fabulous Flournoy
- 2019-2022 Ian MacLeod
- 2022-present Marc Steutel
Retired Numbers
- #5 for TJ Walker 2000–2007
Hall of Fame
- TJ Walker 2000-2007
- Lynard Stewart 2007-2010
