He trained the best players in the world one workout at a time. Then he built them a league where the athletes own a piece of the upside.
Alex Bazzell spent a decade in gyms that opened before dawn and emptied out after dark. He was the guy in the corner with the clipboard and the ball cart, feeding passes to Carmelo Anthony, sharpening Kyrie Irving's handle, breaking down footwork with Trae Young. Skills training is a quiet profession. You measure your work in other people's highlights. For a long time, that was the whole job, and he was very good at it.
Then he started asking a different question. Not how to make a great player better, but why the best women in the world had nowhere to play for half the year.
The WNBA season runs a few short months. In the offseason, its stars scattered overseas to Russia, Turkey, China, chasing paychecks that dwarfed their domestic salaries, playing in half-empty arenas thousands of miles from home. The pay came with a cost: missed families, added mileage on their bodies, and a career built around leaving. Bazzell had a front-row seat to the whole arrangement. His wife lived it.
What we want to build this into is the Champions League of women's basketball. And that's not a competition towards the WNBA.Alex Bazzell
On July 6, 2023, Bazzell went public with an answer. Alongside two of the sport's biggest names, Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart, he announced Unrivaled, a women's professional league that would play a compressed, made-for-television version of the game right here at home. Three-on-three. Full court, just shorter. Three seven-minute periods and an Elam Ending instead of a clock winding down in the fourth. Ten weeks in the dead of winter, exactly when the calendar was empty.
The idea sounds obvious in hindsight, which is usually the sign that it wasn't. Plenty of people had looked at the WNBA offseason and seen a scheduling problem. Bazzell looked at it and saw a market with no supplier.
The salary number got the headlines. An average of roughly $220,000 a player for a ten-week season is real money in women's team sports, enough to make staying home the rational choice instead of the sentimental one. But the salary wasn't the part Bazzell talked about most. The part he kept coming back to was ownership.
Players at Unrivaled don't just draw a check. They hold equity in the league itself, a stake in whatever the thing becomes. If the valuation climbs, so does their piece. It reframes the athlete from labor to partner, and it solves a problem that has dogged women's sports forever: the people generating the value rarely capture it.
They're getting their paychecks but they're also having ownership and upside of the growth and popularity of this league.Alex Bazzell
You can hear the trainer in that logic. Player development was the family business long before the league was. When Bazzell says the number one focus is the players, it isn't a slogan he workshopped for a pitch deck. It's the only lens he's ever had.
Before the front office, Bazzell was a guard. He played college basketball at Missouri-Kansas City, later at Lindenwood, then turned pro and spent time in Germany. The playing career was solid, not stratospheric, the kind that teaches you exactly where your own ceiling is and gives you a lifelong respect for the people whose ceiling is higher.
He came back to the States in 2014 and went all in on training. The client list grew into an All-Star roster. He ran camps at Kobe Bryant's Mamba Academy and worked with Bryant's daughter Gianna, absorbing the late Laker's obsessive approach to the craft. In 2020 he co-founded his first company, Through The Lens, a subscription video platform built with Carmelo Anthony to let athletes own and scale their personal brands. The through-line was already visible: put the athlete at the center, and give them the ownership.
A skeptic's league doesn't attract this list. When Unrivaled raised its Series B in 2025, it was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with Serena Williams' Serena Ventures, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Alex Morgan's Trybe Ventures alongside. The earlier and broader investor group had already pulled in a crowd: Stephen Curry, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Michael Phelps, Coco Gauff, Trae Young, the Wagner brothers, even Ashton Kutcher and Carmelo Anthony.
Bazzell has been careful about the money in a way that's telling. When the Series B closed, he pointed out that the round found them rather than the other way around. "Unlike the first two rounds where we were out in the market, this one was organic," he said. In a category where hype usually outruns revenue, that's the quiet flex: the league doubled its first-season revenue projections and didn't have to go begging for the next check.
This isn't a gimmick. We're not here just trying to do clickbait stuff.Alex Bazzell
The easiest story to tell about Unrivaled is a war story - a scrappy startup coming for the establishment. Bazzell refuses to tell it. Every time a reporter frames Unrivaled against the WNBA, he flattens the premise. The leagues don't overlap on the calendar. They share the same athletes. One growing helps the other.
"We're not here unless the WNBA is growing the way it is," he says. It's a genuinely counterintuitive position for a founder, and it's probably the smartest one available. Unrivaled needs the WNBA's stars to be stars. Picking a fight would only shrink the pie both leagues are trying to grow.
His broader argument is that the market has been mispriced for years. "Once people remove the women's sports blinders and start looking at it relative to what's going on in the ecosystem in terms of the data," he says, "it points to that right now." Translation: the demand was always there. Somebody just had to build the supply and price it correctly.
The personal thread runs straight through the professional one. Bazzell first met Collier when he was her trainer, back when she was a young star on her way to becoming one of the best players in the world. They married in 2022 and have a daughter, Mila. Now they run a company together, with a clean division of labor - she is the face on the court, he is the operator building the business around it, and around dozens of others like her.
It's a specific kind of ambition. Bazzell isn't chasing a viral highlight or a single sold-out night. He's building slowly and deliberately toward something durable: a league that pays women at the top of the market, hands them a stake in the upside, and treats the game itself as the product rather than the pitch. Ten weeks a year, for now. The rest is a bet that the data was right all along.