How a broken hand and a love of home got Stephen Curry to launch travel team in Charlotte
Growing up in Charlotte, Stephen Curry played grassroots basketball and has frequently said it was one of the best experiences of his young life. As he has developed into one of the world’s biggest athletic superstars, and a 3-time NBA champion, Curry said he has often thought about starting a travel team in his hometown, but there was always one problem.
“If I did it,” he said, “I had to have 100 percent confidence and faith in the team I put together to help run the (organization). Knowing how crazy the schedule is with the NBA season, that part of it was very important to me, so I had to be patient to find the right team to wave my flag and be able to lead these kids in the right direction and have similar principals and mindset that I do when it comes to the game of basketball.
“It took me 11 years really to get to that point.”
This spring, for the first time, Curry will have his travel team. Team Curry, which will be based in Charlotte, will begin playing next month. Two boys teams (16U and 17U) will play on the Under Armour Association (UAA) travel circuit with 23 other programs nationally. Under Armour, for which Curry is the company’s most prominent ambassador, sponsors those teams. Three Team Curry girls teams (15U, 16U, 17U) will also play on the Under Armour circuit.
Under Armour does not offer a UAA circuit for 15U boys, so that 15U Curry team will play on the Under Armour Rise circuit, which is an invitational pay-to-play league that plays alongside the UAA.
“I’m going to be as involved as I can be,” Curry said. “Obviously, with the team being in Charlotte, I can’t be there on a daily basis, but in terms of the travel schedule, finding ways to be at those tournaments, talking to kids and being available as much as I can for both the boys and girls teams, if they’ve got questions, and to be able to have those connections, that means a lot.”
Partnering with familiar faces
To handle the day-to-day operations of his program, Curry — a former All-American at Davidson College — has partnered with two former Davidson players.
Logan Kosmalski graduated from Davidson in 2005 and Brendan Winters in 2006. Curry was a freshman at Davidson during the 2006-07 season. Winters jokes that he helped recruit Curry to the school.
Kosmalski was a radio commentator during Davidson’s well-known NCAA Tournament Elite 8 run during Curry’s sophomore season. Kosmalski was home from playing professionally overseas while recovering from knee surgery.
And in 2009, when Curry was playing his rookie year with the Warriors, Kosmalski and Winters began hosting a summer camp using the name Pro Skills Basketball. Three years later, Pro Skills morphed into a travel program. Today, there are Pro Skills programs in 10 cities and eight states.
Curry said he kept up with his buddies and watched how they developed their program. Meanwhile, Pro Skills began to put dozens of high school athletes into college. Along the way, Winters started working at Curry’s summer camp in California and met some of the Under Armour basketball officials who were there.
Two years ago, Pro Skills teams began playing in the UA Rise invitational circuit for non-sponsored teams. Last summer, the Pro Skills 15U, 16U and 17U teams all qualified for the UA Rise championship tournament, and the 17U team produced eight Division I recruits.
“I think Under Armour took notice,” said Winters, 36, “and we started talking to them about becoming a (sponsored) team and one of (the Under Armour officials) knew our connection to Steph. I didn’t know this at the time, but Steph and (former college roommate, teammate and business partner) Bryant (Barr) had become interested in doing more with UAA over the last couple of years because his SC 30 camp has grown. It’s all UAA kids for the most part, and someone suggested ‘Maybe you can run Steph’s team.’”
The big post-injury phone call
So about seven months ago, Winters reached out to Barr to start a conversation about Pro Skills running a featured team for Curry. It turned into many.
“AAU is interesting,” said Barr, who is president of SC30 Inc, Curry’s marketing, investment and philanthropic arm based in northern California. “It’s completely different from when I played. It is its own animal now, and you hear stories about how AAU is ruining basketball and how it’s not good for kids. I think Steph has been slow to jump into the AAU world simply because he’s had a lot of things going on and he wanted to make sure things were done the right way.”
So there were more conversations, followed by more conversations — particularly around Curry’s desire to have a girls program alongside the boys — but Team Curry really got launched hours after one of the worst days of Curry’s professional career.
On the night before Halloween, Curry broke his left hand playing against the Phoenix Suns. The next day, a Thursday, Curry took a phone call from Winters and Kosmalski and Barr.
The two guys from Pro Skills were trying to close.
“He had his normal fears about AAU and he heard stuff that goes on,” Winters said of Curry, “and he wanted to make sure we could handle his brand and represent him in a professional manner.”
Winters said everybody agreed to move forward that day.
The team was announced in early January with social media posts from Curry, who has more than 43 million combined Twitter and Instagram followers.
Everything after that, Winters said, has been a blur.
“We knew the day he was going to announce it and we set everything up through Bryant,” Winters said. “We knew the time he wanted and wanted to make sure the phone lines and the website weren’t crashing. Once it came out, it was wild to see it in real life. He posted and it had 5,000 likes and within five minutes, it was at 50,000. Our Team Curry (social media) just exploded. It was my first glimpse at what celebrities go through on a daily basis....It was a great experience. It showed us the power of Steph’s brand.”
And now, the competition
With Team Curry entering the market, there are four shoe-sponsored teams that are primarily based in Charlotte: Curry and Team Charlotte are on Under Armour. Team Loaded North Carolina is on the adidas Gauntlet, and Team United plays on the Nike EYBL circuit.
Each circuit follows a similar formula: bring the teams together for a set number of weekends, including the three “live periods” that college coaches can come watch. The shoe companies cover travel expenses and provide apparel.
But is there room enough for four sponsored teams in Charlotte?
“I think the market can support another shoe team,” said Edward Addie, director of N.C. basketball for Team Loaded. “When you bring in a team with the quality that I think Team Curry will be, combining it with one of the most popular NBA stars in recent memory, I definitely welcome it. I think nothing but good things can come out of it.”
Curry will compete most directly with Team Charlotte, run by former UNC star and NBA point guard Jeff McInnis. Both teams are sponsored by Under Armour.
“Honestly,” McInnis said, “it doesn’t bother me because we’re established with what we do. It’s another team, whether it’s Under Armour or adidas. Our focus stays the same: getting kids in school. Now of course, we want to (play) them because they are UAA. That’s Pro Skills and we’ve done well against them the last couple of years. That won’t change because their uniforms say ‘Curry’ now. But me and (Winters) talked about this (at the Under Armour director’s meeting in Baltimore), the ultimate goal is putting kids in school. But competition can be healthy. Competing is competing.”
N.C. high school recruiting analyst Rick Lewis points out that Curry will take just 10 players per age group and the Charlotte market is rich with talent. He also said that, outside of Team Charlotte, the other organizations recruit heavily from outside the city. Travel basketball players for N.C. teams can come from bordering states -- Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.
“So is this one too many?” Lewis said. “I don’t think so, but that’s a tough question. That’s probably going to be for the shoe companies to decide. I know there’s a tremendous amount of talent here, but none of them are always going to just recruit from the Charlotte-area. They’re going to get kids from all over the state. I think Team Charlotte will be more geared to players from Charlotte and the surrounding areas. But I do know, there’s a lot of talent to go around.”
Curry: I’m committed to this
Curry said he plans to slowly grow the program through the years, expanding on his partnership with Winters and Kosmalski.
“We have a ‘TCC’ principal that stands for Trust, Commitment, Care, that all Davidson players that have gone through the program and played for (coach) Bob McKillop stand by,” Curry said. “And I’ve gotten to know (Winters) a fair amount over the last, whatever, 13 years and watched a lot of his moves with (Pro Skills) since they started it, him and Logan....We have an opportunity to do something special with Team Curry.”
Curry said he wants his players to learn to use basketball to get life experiences they might not otherwise be privy to.
“It has the opportunity to open so many doors for them,” Curry said, “but as long as their priorities are straight in life. So obviously taking care of their family, doing well in school, making sure they are well-rounded citizens and that they understand basketball is a fun game that can take them to so many great places, but they have to have everything else in check. The culture we want to develop with that is extremely important.”
Barr said Curry hopes to play for the U.S Olympic Team this summer, but will be involved with his new travel team. He said Curry has recorded videos for players and is willing to do phone calls and video calls and that Curry is getting involved in the design of the team’s uniforms.
“This team will get the best of the best,” Barr said. “They’ll get his Curry 8 shoes before anybody else....But we want to be realistic. We don’t want kids signing up and thinking Steph’s going to show up. We can’t physically be there, week in and week out, and we need to make sure (Winters and Kosmalski) are representatives of Steph and an extension of what we care about, and I don’t think you could hand pick two better people than Logan and Brendan to lead that for Charlotte and wave Steph’s flag in that way.”
Curry said he feels the same.
“I think as we wanted to get off the ground,” Curry said, “there’s something special about reaching kids in the same area I grew up in, learning the game of basketball and instilling confidence in me through the process. That’s a great place to start. Who knows, down the road, we may have an opportunity to bring it, in some version, to the Bay Area as well, but from my origin story being in Charlotte, it made sense to have it in the 704 that taught me so much about the game and hopefully recreate that experience for so many other kids that are excited to compete at the highest level.”
This story was originally published February 13, 2020 at 12:48 PM.
