ATLANTA – Overtime recently launched a women’s basketball league for elite high school recruits called Overtime Select. The league will have competition between eight teams over four weeks in August and September.
The league was launched as an additive piece to AAU and high school basketball, as a platform for recruits to showcase their talents against the best high schoolers in the country and learn the necessary skills to succeed from a business standpoint in the NIL landscape.
“We learned a lot,” Sascha Malas, the director of Overtime Select, said. “We learned that the girl’s game is very different from the boy’s game. If we had done what we did for the boys [with Overtime Elite], it would have been lazy. It wouldn’t have worked.”
Overtime Elite has reshaped the recruiting world for men’s basketball with its large platform and alternate route of reaching the professional ranks, but Overtime recognized that the women’s game needed a different approach.
Rather than starting a full-time league where women’s players would move to Atlanta and leave their high school and AAU teams behind, Overtime acknowledged the players’ desire to stay where they were but added a new platform for their talents into the mix.
“We worked with them and their parents to determine a schedule that worked for them,” Malas said. “We wanted it to be additive. But still give them all the other things they wanted like more coverage, the competition, the exposure, media training and brand building opportunities.”
Overtime Select built for women’s game
Malas and Overtime combined each of those concepts into Select. The league will feature gameplay between top recruits who play on different circuits, media training, an NIL summit and the large platform that Overtime provides.
The league is also connected with several advisors who will mentor the players throughout the summer, including UConn’s Paige Bueckers, LSU’s Flau’jae Johnson, New York Liberty star Breanna Stewart and more.
“It was really important to bring in WNBA stars and legends who the girls aspire to be,” Malas said. “We have a really big list of women that are heavily involved with contributing.”
Their roles vary, but Bueckers was present at Captain’s Weekend to talk to each team captain. Johnson, Stewart and Seimone Augustus have hopped on Zoom calls to provide mentorship and many advisors wrote a welcome letter to each captain with advice.
The combination of talent, mentorship and business opportunities provides a platform unlike any other in the women’s basketball world. Overtime’s goal was, in part, to show these young girls what they deserve.
“They’re coming here and getting what they deserve,” Malas said. “The level of accommodations, planning and facilities they have access to. It’s what they deserve to have.”
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