The prep basketball developmental tour has been dominated by Nike’s EYBL, the Adidas Uprising circuit and the Under Armour Gauntlet. Now a new contender may be joining that group, and its being backed by Under Armour’s main man … and targeting the players who specifically aren’t expected to be contenders.
On Wednesday, Steph Curry announced the development of the Underrated Tour, a series of high school basketball camps for players who are rated as three-star prospects or lower.
Curry announced the Underrated Tour in a piece for The Player’s Tribune. The Tour aims to help players like Curry in high school gain more exposure and, potentially, other collegiate opportunities. The tour is being bankrolled by the Japanese Amazon, Rakuten, which also serves as the jersey sponsor for the Warriors and one of Curry’s endorsers.
The tour is scheduled to kick off a week from Saturday in Los Angeles, with six subsequent stops to follow. As reported by Forbes, one of those stops will come in Phoenix and will focus specifically on female athletes.
“This is Stephen’s brainchild and predicated on who he is and his experiences,” Jeron Smith, the CMO of Curry’s SC30 Inc., told Forbes. “It is personal to him because it is so reflective of his story.” Smith and his team will be the operational team behind the Underrated Tour, though Curry is expected to be in attendance at all or nearly all the tour stops.
It will be fascinating to track some of the players who go through Curry’s Underrated Tour in the coming years, both to see if they do matriculate to higher rankings and more prestigious scholarship offers, or whether they wind up in much the same place they start. If nothing else, the tour certainly gives some players a much-needed elevated platform, and maybe even a chance to break through to reach the heights that Curry has with a smoother path to the summit.