New Orleans Sun Belt Nets
team tennis franchise
The New Orleans Sun Belt Nets were a charter franchise of World Team Tennis (WTT). The team first played as the Cleveland Nets in 1974, and was known as the Cleveland–Pittsburgh Nets in 1977, when it played roughly half of its home matches in each city. The Nets moved to New Orleans for the 1978 season. Following the 1978 season, the Nets announced that the team would fold. The Nets played all five seasons in WTT from the league's inception in 1974, until its suspension of operations after the 1978 season. The team had losing records in each of its five seasons.
Team history
Inaugural season
The Nets were founded as WTT's charter franchise for Cincinnati, Ohio in 1973, by Bill DeWitt Jr. and Brian Heekin. Within weeks of being established, and before the team ever had a name in Cincinnati, DeWitt and Heekin sold it to Cleveland radio executive Joseph Zingale who paid them the same $50,000 as the franchise fee they had paid to WTT. Zingale relocated the team to Cleveland with a plan to have it play its home matches at the Cleveland Public Hall starting with the league's inaugural 1974 season and name it the Cleveland Nets. Before the draft, Zingale spoke to Clark Graebner, a native of Cleveland, about playing for the team as well as to being its coach and general manager.
The public source identifies “New Orleans Sun Belt Nets” as team tennis franchise. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Orleans, Belt and Nets.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18127065. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1974, 1977, 1978 and 1973.
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This entry incorporates text from “New Orleans Sun Belt Nets” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.