NBA star Steph Curry backs coaching company

School and club sports provide numerous development opportunities for young athletes, but NBA star Steph Curry is putting his support behind a different avenue: private coaching.

Curry, an MVP candidate who this season led the Golden State Warriors to the best record in the Western Conference, was announced Monday as part owner of CoachUp, a company that connects young athletes in 32 different sports with private coaches. Curry himself worked one-on-one with a coach as a young basketball player, and he wants to provide the same opportunities for other athletes across the country.

“Today, I’m joining the leadership team of a company I believe is making tremendous strides for all athletes: CoachUp,” Curry wrote on the company’s website. “This partnership represents a way for me to pay it forward and help kids all over the country. It’s an extension of how much coaching has meant to me and helped me throughout my life. No matter their sport or skill level, kids should have access to great coaches to develop their game, hone their skills and build their confidence.”

Some additional details from Sports Illustrated:

The idea behind CoachUp is brilliantly simple: It’s a matchmaker for players of a variety of sports and coaches able to instruct them. The match is made through the filtering of defined variables ranging from game-specific (player position) to logistics (training location and availability). It is a resource born of the age of accessibility; the coaches and players aren’t new, merely the means to connect them. That process is much cleaner and safer than combing Craigslist for a coach to instruct a player in his early teens. 

“Coaches are so influential,” said CoachUp founder Jordan Fliegel. “And yet there was no platform, there was no governing body that really was able to say [which] are good coaches who are safe with good reviews and base all of that on data.”

This is a genuine evolution within the far-reaching and profitable industry of basketball development. The days of high school basketball as a self-standing entity are long since over. For years, AAU leagues have been populated with the best prospects in the country, most of whom pay their own way for participation and travel. That involvement (and cost) won’t be replaced by private coaching in the vast majority of cases, but compounded.

“I don’t think it’s all just private coaching and skill work and it’s not all just strictly playing AAU basketball or competitive basketball games that makes a great basketball player,” Curry said. “It’s a little bit of both.”