Allen Kopelman walked on to a Division III basketball team and played professionally in Europe while posting YouTube videos starting in 2005. Viewers asked about his mindset approach, which he expanded beyond athletics. After retiring in 2015, he applied those same mental-training principles to coaching entrepreneurs and business leaders.
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Sat the bench in high school the one year that I played, walked on to play college ball, hustled my way into playing college ball at the Division III level, which is the third tier of sports. That's not where the pros come from. Hustled my way into playing pro ball, built a nearly decade-long career playing basketball, mostly internationally, mostly in Europe. At the same time, Allen started publishing videos to this new website called YouTube. This was 2005 when I first started, and this was before YouTube was YouTube. But I started to build an audience through that, just showing people how to practice basketball. A few years into that, about 5 years in, the players started asking me questions about mindset. I started talking about mindset. People who didn't play sports heard those videos and they started reaching out and saying, hey, that way you just— you describe mindset and the way you break it down, Dre, is useful for people off the court. It's useful for people who don't play sports. So that's what I knew, how I knew what my transition would be from sports to the next thing, because a lot of people don't realize this: athlete careers are very short and we usually do something else after we stop playing. So I stopped playing in 2015. 2015, and for the last 10+ years, I've been working with entrepreneurs, business owners, team leaders, not just on the mindset pieces, but as I worked with more entrepreneurs, I learned they also needed the strategies, the systems, and the execution layer. And that's really where I've been focusing, uh, since then.
