Cleats kick up grass, knees drive high, and with each decisive step, several dozen teenage athletes drive their way over ladders and ankle-high hurdles up a hill.
After reaching the top, they descend slowly back down and, when cued, drop to the ground and begin pushups, mountain climbers, or shoulder taps from a plank position.
Up and down the hill they go, pushing themselves as coaches call out orders under a blazing sun on a breezy summer morning at Nazareth University.
“Training the heart rate, the muscles, all at the same time — all the things that the kids aren't used to. It shocks the nervous system,” said trainer Ithmar Robinson, known as “Coach Freeze" to the campers.
Welcome to Hoop N’ Holla summer basketball camp, where student athletes train for elite-level competition, and prepare for future careers in the sport.
“Not only do we teach basketball here, we teach leadership, we teach financial literacy, nutrition, mental health,” Robinson said. “We're teaching the kids: ‘Be yourself. Be the best you.'”
That message comes at an important time.
Young athletes are facing more opportunity — and pressure — in the increasingly chaotic world of college sports. Ever-evolving name, image, and likeness — or NIL — deals and changing rules around direct school compensation, school transfers and eligibility have created an environment ripe for abuse.
Congress has attempted to step in, most recently with a Protect College Sports Act that seeks to impose a regulatory framework. The bill failed to advance out of the Senate last week before members adjourned for an extended summer recess. A similar measure stalled in the House earlier this year.
The evolution of college sports began in earnest when NIL officially began in 2021, and in the years since top-performing student athletes have been navigating agents and sponsorship opportunities, and everything that comes with it long before graduating high school. Even those high school careers are changing, taking young athletes to prep schools far from home, seeking the best exposure, competition and training.
‘We see the whole pie’
At the bottom of the hill at Nazareth, 16-year-old David Johnson chats it up with fellow campers.
“I think we definitely create a lot of dawgs, you know?" Johnson said of the high-caliber athletes coming out of the Rochester area. “We don't have an actual like, team or good college to go to, to work towards. So it's really just get it out da mud” — a phrase roughly translating to "from the bottom."
Johnson has been playing competitively for about three years, but his dad said he taught him to shoot when he was 5. He’s moved around schools, from Aquinas Institute to Virginia’s Oak Hill Academy, a perennial basketball powerhouse, and he is set to attend Ohio’s Spire Academy, a premier multisport boarding school, starting this fall.
He stands 6-foot-8, is ESPN’s fifth-ranked high school basketball recruit nationally for the class of 2029, and reportedly had a standout summer for the New York Lightning in the Nike Elite Youth Basketball League. He already has college offers from Providence, Virginia Tech, Syracuse and Texas A&M.
“I really just let my game talk for me,” Johnson said.
“The game found him, really,” said his dad, Zaviour Johnson. “I caught him in his room watching old Scottie Pippen videos, and old Chicago Bulls videos, and players that's not around anymore, in the middle of the night up to like midnight, and I was like, ‘Wow, no, this is serious for him.’”
He watched his son’s game develop and draw attention because of the consistency of his jump shot, his range, and his game IQ. His son said he turned heads for other reasons.
“A lot of people know me as my ‘fro. I just started growing it out for the past, like, year now,” David Johnson said.
Whatever the reason, people took notice. Nike posted a clip of him during his first tournament, and then the attention and enticing sponsorship deals started rolling in.
“At first, it was really confusing” the younger Johnson said, “We tried to take everything all at once, so it was like, kind of hectic.”
This is exactly the kind of challenge and opportunity that coach Mitchell Harris works to prepare families and athletes for.
"Historically, what you do is you deprive people so long and then you put crumbs in front of them,” Harris said. “Because they never had anything, they just, they love the crumbs. They don't realize the crumbs came from a huge pie.
“So we say, well, we're not deprived. We're not going to feel deprived,” he continued. “And because we're not deprived, we're not attracted by crumbs. We see the whole pie.”
David Johnson said things have gotten a lot more organized for him and his family since he signed with Roc Nation. The sports management agency can provide guidance with contracts, endorsement deals, and whatever is to come.
Pitfalls and guardrails
Part of the financial literacy portion of the Hoop N’ Holla is understanding the business side of basketball to avoid getting exploited or scammed.
“We make sure our parents are well aware of the pitfalls,” Harris said. “And we always tell them: Stay away from the word ‘perpetuity.’”
The stalled federal legislation aims to place better guardrails for student athletes, including added regulations for college NIL agreements and capping agent fees at 5%. But governing high school NIL is left to the states and most, including New York, provide limited guidance.
And there is no oversight or certification of agents at the high school or college level to ensure protection.
“There's just simply very little support,” said Bill Carter, founder of NIL Forum and a consultant for agencies, attorneys, and universities.
“The vulnerability there is that you have people sort of holding themselves out as, say, NIL agents that don't really have any experience and may not be trustworthy figures,” Carter said. “But (they) are able to access a high school athlete and ... enter into that athlete's world where there's soon to be a lot of money involved.”
One difference between the business world of college athletes and professional athletes is how agents operate.
"The (professional league) agent business, even though people don't necessarily see it this way, is actually highly regulated,” Carter said. “So to be an NBA, or NFL, Major League Baseball agent, you are certified by the Players Union in those leagues. Because college sports doesn't have a players' union, there's no certification process.”
Without a certification process, Carter said there’s room for inexperienced or untrustworthy people to take advantage of athletes and their families who might not have the skillset to manage big money deals.
“I think we need to figure out a handful of rules that create more calm and consistency,” he said, though doubtful any federal regulations will be signed into law anytime soon. “The initial policy that the NCAA still to this day has in place — the NIL interim policy is still in place — it doesn't actually offer a lot of direction. It maybe offers some guardrails to schools and others.”
‘It comes with sacrifice’
Back at Nazareth, Hoop N’ Holla camp is an extension of a larger program during the school year that is based out of the Rochester Community Sports Complex, part of the city of Rochester’s recreation centers. The program is set up to address the realities of NIL, and collegiate and professional basketball specifically.
It was born from a 2014 mentoring program, and aims to bridge the gap between talent and opportunity by providing low cost support for athletes and their families, and to ensure these student athletes are also performing well in the classroom.
One of the students who have come through the program is Loren Green, an incoming high school senior who recently transferred from Aquinas Institute in Rochester to Darrow Academy outside Albany.
The 5-foot-8 shooting guard is considered one of the top players in the state, and at 17 years old has about a dozen college offers so far, she said, including Syracuse, Siena College, and Western Michigan. She dreams of playing in the WNBA and internationally.
“If you're a leader in the classroom,” she said, “if you're showing your teacher that you're willing to answer questions without feeling embarrassed and things like that, you're going to do the same thing on the court because it translates to both sides.”
Getting to this point, she said, is about sacrifice.
“You can't go out with your friends all the time, or every weekend,” she explained. “Because once you get to a high level, it's really about who works the hardest.
“Everyone's as talented as you. Everyone can shoot. Everybody can drive,” she said. “But what sets you apart from other people?”
Ultimately, the goal here is bigger than the game, camp operators say; it’s to get the kids to connect to something inside themselves, find the confidence and direction to maximize their opportunities.
“As his father, I'm just happy to see him happy and thriving,” Zaviour Johnson said.
“For him, his mentality is to ... not only make it to the league, but to be a positive role model in that space for many Muslim Americans who are kind of like underrepresented in that space, or may not feel comfortable disclosing their religion,” he added. “But he wants to be an advocate for everybody.”
And that is part of the camp's focus as well, organizers say — not just achieving personal success but how to use that success to help your community and society.
“What I fear is, and one of the things we want to try to steer them away from is, living a selfish life,” coach Mitchell Harris said. “Living a life where your values are about attaining things individually instead of having an impact on others.”
