LeBron James and Kevin Durant are launching a basketball league that could get high-schoolers NIL pay in cash, equity, or both, along with their own sneaker deals.

The league is called Futures Basketball League (FBL), and James’s LRMR VENTURES, LLC and Durant’s Boardroom Sports Holdings are in the founding group. Derrick Rose and Paolo Banchero are also founding partners and team owners, alongside Gary Vaynerchuk and SC Holdings’ Jason Stein and Daniel Haimovic.

The league will put 100 of the top boys prospects in the country on 12 regional teams. Players get NIL pay from the league and keep the right to sign outside deals, including with sneaker brands.

Nike’s Elite Youth Basketball League runs from late April through May. Durant’s Team Durant and James’s Strive for Greatness both compete in it, but FBL is set to tip off around the same time and run through August.

Grassroots basketball has run through shoe-company circuits for over a decade. Nike has EYBL, Adidas has 3SSB, and Under Armour has UAA. In Futures, the teams belong to athletes and investors.

The first players will be announced in the coming weeks, showing where the top 100 prospects want to play in April.

The tallest player in professional tennis now works at one of the fastest-growing AI companies in the world.

Reilly Opelka, who stands 6-foot-11, has joined Cognition, the company behind the AI coding agent Devin. His LinkedIn lists the title as “Member of the Non-Technical Staff”.

Opelka took the job while recovering from wrist surgery. The 29-year-old reached a career-high No. 17 in February 2022, has won 4 ATP singles titles, and still plans to return to the tour.

Cognition raised more than $2B at a $48B valuation on September 8, in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel. Run-rate revenue climbed from $492M in May to almost $900M, and the valuation nearly doubled from $26B in about 4 months.

Opelka was an investor first, saying he visited the Cognition house as a tennis player, spent 2 hours with Russell Kaplan learning what the team was building, met CEO Scott Wu, and invested that same day.

Now his job is to connect Cognition with people across sports and beyond; despite being the only one on the team without a college degree… “Everyone else here has IOI medals, but I have a pretty decent serve” (Reilly Opelka, LinkedIn). However, Opelka has also been an angel investor since 2021, naming Ramp and Long Lake alongside Cognition, so his network runs deep outside of tennis as well.

3 college basketball players just wrote the first collective bargaining term sheet in college sports.

Tyler Lundblade, Campbell Duncan and DeWayne Brown II were elected by their Tennessee teammates as player reps. They built the proposal with Athletes.org over the summer, then negotiated it with Tennessee's athletic department in August and September.

The term sheet was released this week. It would replace revenue sharing and school-affiliated NIL deals with a single athletic services contract. One line in the document reads: "Players are paid for their athletic services, not for influencer deliverables."

A salary cap would come with a spending floor. Schools would have to spend 89% of the average annual cap across a 4-year window, and those caught cheating the cap could lose up to 100% of their conference payout.

Every player would get guaranteed minimum pay, including injured players, who keep 100% of it. Agent fees would be capped at 5%, and the transfer portal would become a single 15-day window after the national championship game.

Athletes.org says Tennessee's administration has not agreed to or endorsed the terms, and the sheet includes no dollar figure for the cap, so nothing here is binding yet.

The Protect College Sports Act passed the Senate 77-22 on Sept. 28 and needs House approval by Dec. 17 (increasingly unlikely with the Democrat majority). That bill would set the rules through Congress. Tennessee's term sheet would set them through bargaining with the players.

Revenue sharing started in 2025 under rules written by schools, conferences and courts. This is the first time players have written a version of their own.

Heroboard is a Pilates board on wheels built by Donald McIntyre after he spent 10 years as a personal trainer. The board is now patented, made in the USA, and used at Alo Yoga’s studios in New York and Los Angeles.

McIntyre sold his condo and a side business to fund the 2021 launch. He hired a media buyer, spent 3 months of savings on ads that produced few sales, and then dropped the agency to grow the brand on his own.

In June 2023, he signed a 3-month contract with OPTYO, which took over performance marketing, rebuilt the website, and started producing content in-house. Monthly sales went from $3,000 to six figures in about 60 days. Heroboard now takes multi-unit orders from gyms and studios, and the company says it has sold more than 11,327 boards in 58 countries (Athletetech).

If you are a founder building in sports, tech, or wellness, OPTYO helps sports, fitness, and wellness brands grow their online presence by improving how they market and reach customers. Reply to this email and we can connect you with Andre.

16-year-old pro racing driver Maverick McKenna has joined SweatLabs as a brand ambassador in a multi-year equity deal.

SweatLabs makes infrared saunas built for performance and recovery, and has signed Maverick as its fourth athlete brand ambassador.

Maverick is a pro racing driver competing in Formula 4, already building his business portfolio at 16.

Deal done through Athletes & Assets™, more on the way soon…