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Former longtime Inquirer writer Joe Juliano will join the U.S. Basketball Writers Association Hall of Fame

The USBWA is an association of college basketball writers. Juliano covered Villanova for the last 14 seasons and wrote about some of the most dramatic games in the last three decades.

Joe Juliano was hard at work covering this Penn-Villanova game at the Palestra in December 2021.
Joe Juliano was hard at work covering this Penn-Villanova game at the Palestra in December 2021.Read moreCHARLES FOX / Staff Photographer
    by Gary Miles
    Updated 
    Published 

Joe Juliano, The Inquirer’s longtime college basketball writer and Villanova beat writer, will be inducted into the U.S. Basketball Writers Association Hall of Fame for the class of 2022, the organization announced Thursday.

Juliano, who left The Inquirer in January, covered Villanova and college basketball in general for the last 14 seasons. He also reported on coach Jay Wright’s first two seasons at Villanova, in 2001 and 2002; coach Steve Lappas’ last four seasons with the Wildcats; and coach Rollie Massimino’s 1988 Elite Eight squad.

Over his 36 years at The Inquirer, Juliano covered countless college basketball games. He was there in 2016 when Kris Jenkins hit a buzzer-beating three-pointer in Houston to give Villanova the 2016 national championship, and he witnessed and wrote about Wright’s induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame last September.

A graduate of Temple University, Juliano was hired by Inquirer sports editor Jay Searcy in 1985. He had spent the previous seven years working in the sports department of the Philadelphia bureau of United Press International and was worried whether he would find a niche at his new job.

“I liked to refer to myself as a utility infielder, someone who could report and write capably on a number of different sports,” he wrote in his farewell column in January.

“Capably” turned out to be an understatement. Juliano won awards for his writing, covered nearly every team and sport in the region, and honed his reputation as one of the hardest-working and well-liked writers of his era. In addition to college basketball, he covered Penn State football, the Penn Relays, the Masters, the 76ers, Phillies, and other teams.

“Jay Wright nailed it when he called Joe one of the classiest people in this business,” former Inquirer football writer Paul Domowitch posted on Twitter in December.

The U.S. Basketball Writers Association was founded in 1956 by NCCA director Walter Byers.