NEW YORK—Some of the best teenage basketball talent in the country went to a gymnasium in Manhattan on a Friday night in April to show what they could do, and some of the country’s best-known coaches—Villanova’s Jay Wright, Georgetown’s Patrick Ewing, Notre Dame’s Mike Brey—had turned up to see the show.
And so when it came time for the weekend’s marquee matchup, the coaches watched particular players, and the players sneaked glances at particular coaches.
Underneath the baskets, men with the video cameras simply went about their work. In this game, their focus was on several players who are projected as potential NCAA and even NBA stars, including a 6-foot-5 forward named Scottie Lewis.
Lewis, 17, is one of the best college prospects in the Class of 2019. Saint John’s offered him a scholarship after the first game of his freshman season at Ranney School in Tinton Falls, New Jersey. In the months after that—as word of his upside spread—nearly a dozen more programs did the same. But to the men with the video cameras and a growing number of basketball fans who religiously watch Internet videos of promising players, Lewis was already a household name.
How popular was he? A video of his highlights posted online in February 2015—before he entered high school—was titled, without a hint of understatement, “8th Grader Scottie Lewis is UNBELIEVABLE.” It has racked up more than a half-million views on YouTube, and it was later cross-posted on dozens of basketball websites. Shot by a company called City League Hoops, the two-minute and 48-second video showed Lewis, then 14 or 15, making acrobatic dunks and jumpers, blocking shots and performing spins in the lane—his every movement accompanied by a looping, forgettable soundtrack.
“It took me a while to get used to people knowing who I am and the videos just popping up,” said Lewis, who will begin his junior year in high school this fall. “I think it’s good for me. It’s good for my brand. It’s good for my name.”
The highlight mixtape—usually a collection of dunks, blocks, long jump shots and flashy passes—is nothing new, of course, even if coaches often discount their value as a talent-evaluation metric. But in the past decade the phenomenon has grown, both in volume and in its focus on ever younger subjects, with the help of a group of companies devoted to documenting and spreading the word about basketball’s next big thing.
These days, even talented middle schoolers are spotlighted. A video featuring LeBron James’s 11-year-old son has been viewed more than 2 million times. A similar mixtape of a tiny seventh-grade guard from Chicago produced several multiples of that figure.
The increasingly professionalized Internet mixtape business may trace its roots to 2005, when a 19-year-old junior college student in Northern California, Matt Rodriguez, and a few of his friends started a company called Ballislife.
Rodriguez and his friends, part of a group that liked to share highlight videos online, were drawn to the idea of discovering players before anyone else, and of documenting potential NBA All-Stars when they were still relatively unknown teenagers.
“You always hear a lot of stories about the pros when they were in high school, what seems like a myth, about what happened in their games,” Rodriguez said. “For us, we just wanted to be able to capture those moments when we were young kids, just to say, like: ‘Here’s the footage with the story. This is how crazy it was.’”
Soon Rodriguez was devoting more than 60 hours a week to Ballislife while attending art school in Southern California. At the same time, he was developing relationships with top local high-school players, most notably DeMar DeRozan, who became a guard with the Toronto Raptors, and traveling the country to chronicle the rise of future All-Stars like James Harden, Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love.
Image credits: NYT