The Brooklyn Startup Helping High-School Athletes Go Viral
Overtime wants to be the dominant sports network for kids who grew up with iPhones in their pockets.
On the occasion of the Duke freshman Zion Williamson declaring for the N.B.A. draft a couple of months ago, a Brooklyn-based startup called Overtime produced a video retrospective worthy of a veteran’s valedictory. “It didn’t happen overnight,” the narrator says. “Take notes, little bros, because I’m about to give you a history lesson.” We see clips of Williamson at sixteen: winning a dunk contest against the future Oklahoma City Thunder guard Hamidou Diallo in New York City; spinning three-sixty in a Spartanburg, South Carolina, gymnasium. Then more—“it was highlight after highlight after highlight”—at seventeen: windmilling, reversing, soaring head over rim. The video tracks the making of a legend through viral moments, while establishing that Overtime’s cameras were there all along. In August, 2017, Sports Illustrated conferred on Williamson the imprimatur of legacy media with a feature story, which opened with an extended description of a defensive maneuver—“exploding off two feet, extending his arms like a volleyball player trying to block a spike at the net and swatting the ball off the glass”—that had been captured digitally, and then uploaded to Twitter, by Overtime.
For years, courtside paparazzi have been stalking the Amateur Athletic Union circuit, where nearly all the best teen-age players can be found, in order to capitalize on a trade in mixtapes that began on urban playgrounds in the days of videocassettes. But the rise of social media, and a corresponding shift in our viewing habits, has turned this practice into a tech-driven business opportunity. Overtime, which aims to become the predominant sports network for Generation Z—the post-millennials, the kids who’ve grown up with iPhones in their pockets—specializes in producing short videos, like the one described above, that give a semi-professional gloss to the world of high-school, and even middle-school, sports. Its coverage, distributed on YouTube, Instagram, and other platforms, ignores the things that have traditionally preoccupied adult sports fans—standings, scores, stats—in favor of emphasizing stardom, or incipient stardom, via curated highlights and behind-the-scenes color. “they say i’m better than lebron” is the caption for a video starring a fourteen-year-old boy in San Diego, named Mikey Williams. It’s been viewed more than two and a half million times. Another video is titled “I’m the BEST 5th Grader in the World.” That would be Magic Mel, who lives in the Bronx.
