Former college basketball player turns hobby into business putting young athletes in spotlight

Ball Dawgs/Courtesy

Ball Dawgs keeps an eye on rising basketball players across the country.

Attend a prep basketball game in Las Vegas—whether it’s a local matchup of rival high schools or a hyped showdown between AAU teams from opposite coasts—and you’re likely to see a cameraman on the sideline, intent on capturing every highlight.

That’s Ball Dawgs.

Founded in 2018, the Vegas-based company has taken viral hoops content to the next level, growing into a social media monster during the past two years.

The architect of Ball Dawgs is 32-year-old Neal Carter, a onetime Division II basketball player who moved here from New Jersey four years ago to pursue a marketing job with MGM Resorts International. Carter wanted to pick up a coaching job in his spare time; he accepted a position on the staff at Founders Academy, and, taking a cue from his marketing background, attempted to promote his players by starting an Instagram account for the team.

Though his coaching career ended after one season, Carter had grown the IG account to an impressive 1,100 followers in the meantime.

When the next season started up, Carter decided to modify his account into one that promoted Las Vegas prep basketball in general. He brought on former Durango High player Marq Mosley to help expand the business and added Jacob Machnik, still a student at Coronado High at the time, to be the project’s lead videographer.

“It was supposed be a hobby,” Carter says.

That was in October 2019. By branching out, Ball Dawgs was able to collect and disseminate highlights of games and players across the Las Vegas Valley. The concept caught on immediately, and by December, the company was a hit on social media.

“The original plan was to repost things everyone else did,” Carter says. “Then it was, maybe we should start filming it ourselves. We started doing slo-mo clips from our phones, and it kind of exploded from there. By December, we had 8,000 followers. It grew that fast, and it kept snowballing.”

The Ball Dawgs Instagram account now boasts more than 171,000 followers, and its mixtapes (short highlight clips set to contemporary music) have become synonymous with prep basketball culture.

And the company’s reach has expanded well beyond Las Vegas. When players across the country want to hype themselves, they commission Ball Dawgs to make a mixtape. When college-bound athletes want to announce their commitment via a social media video, it’s a Ball Dawgs production.

Ball Dawgs, which is headquartered at the Tarkanian Basketball Academy, now has seven full-time employees (including Carter, Mosley and Machnik), plus a network of more than 30 videographers who cover the nation’s top youth basketball events. If top ballers are facing off at an AAU event in Florida, Arizona, Utah, Texas, California, Pennsylvania, Washington or any other corner of the country, Ball Dawgs has a cameraman on the baseline.

In the 20 months since its inception, Ball Dawgs has produced more than 2,000 highlight videos.

Though highlights of a top-ranked recruit are more likely to go viral, Carter enjoys offering Ball Dawgs’ services to the players who find themselves flying under the radar.

“The passion for me was, I was under-recruited,” Carter says. “There was a lack of technology back then. There was a simple camera that you could use to make a tape and send out to colleges if you were trying to get a scholarship, but if your coach didn’t do it, you didn’t get it. It would have helped me tremendously if I had this opportunity. Early on, I thought, I would love to give kids the footage that we’re filming. Everybody gets mixtapes now, and that has helped grow our brand tremendously.”

Carter says Ball Dawgs has agreements to provide videography services to various AAU teams and even some NBA, WNBA and G-League events, and in the past year it has branched out into operating its own events.

Carter counts the four all-star games and dunk contests the organization hosted in Las Vegas last year as successes, and says Ball Dawgs plans to host a summer camp in August.

For something that began as a hobby shot on cellphones, Ball Dawgs has become the big dawg.

“To see what it has grown into and the people we’ve worked with and the exposure we’ve been able to give some of these players, it’s been really dope,” Carter says.

Business

This story appeared in Las Vegas Weekly.

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