Austin Rivers, who played for seven teams over an 11-year NBA career, is only 32. In other words, he’s a little young for these kids today rants. Yet there he was on his podcast, Off Guard, last year, declaring:
“Highlight culture has killed the game of basketball.”
He’s not alone. His sentiment, shared by countless coaches at every level of basketball, is simple: Young players, driven by the rush for attention and social media clout, are now too interested in producing viral moments and not interested enough in playing the game the “right way.” Call up any YouTube highlight reel and you’ll see a parade of difficult off-the-dribble threes and celebrations after dunks. Extra passes that find the open man and diving attempts for loose balls ... not so much.
One of the biggest platforms for the modern highlight-driven hooper is Overtime, the social media content upstart that has exploded since its launch in 2016 thanks to, primarily, short-form content capturing young players in action. A 10-minute video of Zion Williamson’s final high school game from ’18 has more than six million views on YouTube, for instance. So, in 2021, when Overtime launched Overtime Elite, a league for 16-to-19-year-olds initially positioned as an alternative for kids who didn’t want to play college basketball, plenty of people in the basketball world were skeptical. Was this the latest encroachment of highlight culture on a sport that desperately needed improvement to its youth development system?
Corey Frazier, who is now Overtime Elite’s head of player development, was coaching for the Bradley Beal Elite AAU team when he was first approached by OTE. “The first question I asked, which I’m sure [was] everybody else’s, was, ‘Is this just gonna be a bunch of highlights and people dunking?’ ” he says.
Instead, OTE, now in its fourth year, has become perhaps the best development program for young talent in the United States. In the past three NBA drafts, four alums have been top-10 picks—the same number as Kentucky, which has the most of any NCAA program. In May an Overtime Elite U-18 team went to Berlin to compete at the Adidas Next Generation tournament and won two of its three games, beating powerhouse European clubs Barcelona and Alba Berlin. And those leading the program believe they’re just getting started.
“I’m constantly listening to people and their gripes about high school basketball development,” OTE head of competition Damien Wilkins says. “We try to implement those things here to make it a place that has literally no weaknesses.”
OVERTIME ELITE hit the youth basketball scene as a disruptor, promising six-figure contracts to high school players to coax them away from the traditional college route and into an eight-team league based in a sparkling new facility in Atlanta. That first wave of players, which included eventual top-five 2023 draft choices Amen and Ausar Thompson, signed away their NCAA eligibility and became professionals. The goal, at least initially, was to build a pro league for players too young for the NBA’s age minimum of 19—and land the best teenaged talent in the world in the process.
“I’m sure [college basketball] hated us,” Frazier says.
But Overtime Elite’s emergence came at the same time as drastic changes hit the landscape of college sports: Beginning in July 2021, athletes could profit off their name, image and likeness. Now that colleges could indirectly pay players, OTE lost one of its key advantages in recruiting top talent. In response, OTE began offering a “scholarship option” that doesn’t pay players but allows them to finish their high school studies and remain eligible for college while playing for one of the prep teams in the Overtime Elite League. Every high school player who has signed on to join the program since the end of that first season has chosen the scholarship model, and OTE has now become an essential stop for college coaches hunting for four- and five-star talent.
That quick business model pivot presented an early challenge, but it didn’t change the two “North Stars” of the league in the eyes of Overtime CEO Dan Porter. The first: create a top-tier basketball league that resonates with the Overtime audience. The second: develop “the single best place to train to become a professional basketball player in the world.”
“That hasn’t changed whether they go to college, whether we pay them or not,” Porter says.
Building that “best place to train” required a multilevel approach. It started with hiring respected coaches, including Frazier (who had trained Beal and Jayson Tatum as young players in St. Louis) as well as former college head coaches Kevin Ollie and Dave Leitao. The facility, former Wizards general manager Tommy Sheppard says, is “NBA quality” with three NBA-sized courts, a weight room and advanced technology that tracks every shot players take. And putting young players in an environment where they’re surrounded by other top prospects helps them level up their games and bodies even quicker.
“A lot of places, you probably get three or four high-level guys on the team. But to have 30 high-level guys in the building at one time, that’s iron sharpening iron every day,” Frazier says. “You have your time, you have your workout plan, but you also have, ‘I get to work out with somebody like me or even better than myself every single day.’ ”
There’s an academic component for those working toward a high school diploma, but the model at Overtime Elite more closely resembles that of the overseas basketball academies that are often propped up as the ideal youth development model. “The top academies in Europe, they do an excellent job. I’ve been to the academies. They’re not as equipped as OTE with the arena, the practice facility, all their training opportunities,” says Sheppard, who was with the Wizards for 20 years, until 2023. “When you see the facility itself and you go compared to the best places in Europe, it’s right up there.”
Frazier says the training at OTE tries to model those European academies, but with an American slant. He wants players to learn a lot of the team-centric concepts that players in Europe learn quickly, like how to move without the ball and play in space, while also incorporating more individualized player development that preps Overtime talent to create their own shot at the next level, a skill that’s necessary to star in college and the NBA. But the primary parallel to an academy system for Overtime Elite is the number of touchpoints players have with coaches. Without the limitations that many state associations put on high school teams (and even colleges have limits to how much supervised activity players are allowed in a week), players can get coached in multiple different settings every day rather than just putting up shots in an empty gym.
For instance, five-star guard Jasper Johnson receives coaching outside his team’s practice three times a day: shots up before practice, a film session after class and then a workout following the film session.
This basketball factory is funded by Overtime’s content empire, and essentially everything the players do while there feeds that beast. Streaming games is just the start. Workouts can be mic’d up for YouTube, team outings become vlogs and more and more players are getting in the podcast studio. Netflix’s Formula One series, Drive to Survive, has changed the landscape of sports content, and Overtime believes it is positioned to create the next phase by following the journey of rising star talents, all while delivering it to the prized younger demographic that pro and college leagues are exhausting tons of energy trying to reach.
“Everybody in sports wants to make Drive to Survive, right?” says Porter. “That’s like the gold standard of the thing. And we make One Shot, which is our version that’s on Prime [Video], who’s our partner. But … what would Drive to Survive look like if you dropped it on the floor and it broke into 200 pieces and each of those pieces was on TikTok every day? I think that’s one of the things that we think about and have gotten much, much better at.”
That vision is what helps Overtime Elite to operate as a serious development system rather than as a sideshow for views or internet hype. The content has to be real, raw and authentic, not manufactured. Porter says market research indicates their audience is hunting inspiration—maybe not to be a future five-star recruit but to make a high school team or simply level up their own game. “They want to know how they can be like these players,” Porter says. “The more we can show the life behind the scenes—the workouts, the training—the more they can connect with it.”
All that means the clash between what’s best for content and what’s best for basketball doesn’t come up nearly as often as might be expected. Senior forward Amari Evans, a Tennessee commit in his second year with OTE, says he views them as “two different worlds.” The moments from games that become internet sensations don’t happen if games aren’t competitive, and knowing everything’s on file only ups the stakes for young players who are as focused on building their brands as they are their basketball careers.
“Everything is going to get posted on social media and none of our guys want to be on the wrong end of those clips,” Wilkins says. “Videos of [2024 lottery pick] Rob Dillingham are still trending on social media from when he first came here. But that wasn’t because Rob Dillingham came here and it wasn’t competitive. He had to play well in those clips, and he played well against great competition, right?”
That’s not to say that OTE doesn’t embrace—or even manufacture—traits designed to appeal to a younger audience. Among the quirks of its games are the “big bonus,” a power play–like rule that briefly gives teams a 5-on-3 fast break after fouls rather than free throws. “I would rather watch an [elite prep school] game than an Overtime Elite game. They let those kids play like pros, bro,” says one SEC assistant. “Now the infrastructure, daily routines, that’s better. But the games?”
OTE’s fourth season of games got underway in November, with top recruits like Johnson (who committed to Kentucky), Meleek Thomas (Arkansas) and Bryson Tiller (Kansas) the headliners of this season’s senior class of prospects. In the U.S. at least, there’s no one place with more prep talent than OTE HQ.
So what’s next? Wilkins mentions potentially expanding to add two more teams. Porter is thinking globally after having top-tier international prospects like French big Alexandre Sarr (now with the Wizards), Spanish forward Izan Almansa (playing professionally in Australia) and Brazilian wing Samis Calderon (who also signed with Kansas) come through the program. Overtime Elite has already done broadcasts in French and wants to dip into Portuguese next, given basketball’s growth in Brazil. And the coaches and administrators would like to continue playing in events like the Next Gen tournament, where hopefully they can show the rest of the world what they’re truly about. “I think oftentimes people see what we do on social media and they define us from that,” Wilkins says. “But that’s just audience building. We go play wherever we’re able to play, and we just kind of let the work speak from there. But at the same time, we’re also constantly sharing what we do and pushing Overtime Elite to those people, helping them understand that we are a valid basketball development destination that puts in a lot of time with our guys.”
OTE’s rise to relevance has been swift. To Sheppard, whether that’s because of or in spite of it’s new way of doing things is moot. It comes down to one thing: players. “You know, people can say whatever they want, but you’re gonna go evaluate their talent,” he says. “They have NBA-level talent in their pipeline. So if you don’t like certain things, certain aspects, you know you’ve [still] got to go where the talent is.”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Power Elite: How Overtime Went From Highlight Culture to Basketball Academy.
