Teens With Six Figures To Drop Out Of High School For Basketball


Porter, 55, is the great-nephew of economist Milton Friedman. A digital entrepreneur used to run the game studio. omgpop. Before that, he spent ten years in education, including a term as president of Teach for America. Weiner, now 29, comes from a different generation. He had just passed graduation when they started Overtime with Porter, a three-time Ivy League chess champion at Penn. The idea of ​​creating an alternative path to the NBA appealed to their view of themselves as destructive outsiders. He also promised to be another lucrative business, not by chance.

The ongoing breaking of the traditional order of amateur basketball has become quite clear. Following the Supreme Court decision on 1 July, The NCAA finally allows its athletes to be paid for the use of their names, pictures and likenesses. Yet even as sponsors, television networks, and sneaker companies profit from the billions of dollars that sport has transformed, the vast majority of them earn only the basics of an education. But the dysfunction starts earlier: Games held between high schools that were once at the center of youth rivalry have become almost unimportant. University employees prefer AAU tournaments where they evaluate hundreds of candidates in one weekend. Organized and led by aspiring entrepreneurs, with or without coaching experience, AAU teams traverse the Americas from March to October. “It’s completely unhealthy,” says Ahlee Lewis.

Among the signs that the system was beginning to unravel, Porter and Weiner saw an opportunity. It wasn’t just them. In 2017, LaVar Ball, the father of two NBA guards, founded the Play-for-Pay Junior Basketball Association, a disgruntled high school league with eight franchises nationwide. (They were all called Ballers.) This closed after one season. professional Collegiate League, Founded by a group that included a former assistant athletic director at Stanford, a Cleveland attorney, and NBA veteran David West, he was supposed to start playing this year as a paying alternative to NCAA basketball, but his debut was delayed to 2022; players must be enrolled in college to participate. And because players won’t be eligible for the NBA draft until the year after they graduate from their high school class—a 15-year rule that could be changed after the current collective bargaining agreement with the players’ union expires in 2024—the developmental G League is now accepting candidates who have finished high school but don’t want to play in college.

They kept telling us ‘You can’t get top players’. With every single one we could get safely, it crushed that argument.’

But Porter and Weiner have something these leagues don’t have: the 1.6 billion views their content gets each month. Their new venture, the AAU, is a professional league for juniors that will replace high school and college competition. When they explained the concept to Extension investor Carmelo Anthony, who played in the 19th NBA season, Anthony immediately took it. “He literally split us in the middle of our court and finished for us,” Weiner says. “When we started talking to others about it, most of them said, ‘I was expecting something like this.'”

Most of these people wanted to buy a piece of it. Overtime is backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and a host of investors, including Jeff Bezos, Drake, Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian, and four NBA franchisees. More than $80 million was raised in its most recent funding round in April. Kevin Durant, Trae Young, Devin Booker and more than two dozen current professionals joined Anthony in signing the contract. In its first season, the league split 27 players aged 16 to 20 into three teams of nine. They compete against each other and against high school and international teams that agree to play them. In the coming years, the league hopes to grow to six or eight teams that will eventually face rivals from the G League, top college programs and – “you never know” – the Knicks and Lakers.

Kevin Ollie, who coached UConn at a national championship in 2014, leads the coaching staff of Overtime Elite. Players are given personalized nutrition plans and training programs. They are marketed on Overtime’s social media network. (Sponsorers so far include Gatorade and State Farm, which have signed multi-year, eight-figure contracts with the league. Topps has a licensing deal.) And in the most obvious radical take, each player gets a small share of the company and a salary of at least $100,000 per year. plus bonuses depending on the contract he negotiated. Jalen Lewis and others make over $500,000. (“There is a marketplace,” says Aaron Ryan, a former NBA executive who was hired as the league commissioner—and the players have different values. It means that there is no Final Four. They also allow Overtime Elite players to use the names, images, and likenesses of the Overtimes to use the same assets that college athletes have just earned the right to monetize for them, although Overtime Elite players are allowed to make their own deals with sponsors in non-competitive categories.



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