ATLANTA — Most basketball fans can reminisce back to yesteryear when they played hoops from the crack of dawn all the way to the time the sun retreated behind the horizon. We personified the age-old mantra that we would “play basketball for free.”
Well, today there is a group of teens from across the country and around the globe who also play for hours every day in a professional league called Overtime Elite. The difference here is that these teens are getting paid six figures to play ball.
These teens are being compensated $100,000 — and often more — to play the game they love. It is a new basketball league where the teenagers are able to profit from their skills the way that teen tennis players, actors and musicians have been able to do for decades.
Overtime Elite bucks the traditional way of getting into the NBA. Here, high school juniors, seniors and graduates from around the globe forgo their last years of playing in high school and college. They operate inside a first-class, state-of-the-art arena in the Atlantic Station section of Atlanta.
The league is made up of 27 players who migrated to Georgia where they receive schooling, live and play in the ATL for several months. There are three teams in the league: Team OTE, Team Overtime and Team Elite. There are normally three games apiece on Fridays (at 5 p.m.) and Saturdays (3 p.m.), either with nationally-renowned schools or with each other. There are 23 games in the season, with the playoffs beginning on March 8, 2022, for even more cash prizes.
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