Daniel Poneman frightened me the first time we met.
I was sitting in the bleachers waiting for a Chicago high school basketball game, and this teenager popped out of nowhere. He flew into a monologue about how he loved Ill. Hoops, the e-magazine I ran at the time. He raved about the stories, photos, the whole thing.
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It was flattering to hear, but no one had shown that much enthusiasm for Ill. Hoops before. I wasn’t sure what to make of this 14-year-old kid.
Then Poneman started showing up everywhere. He was at all the marquee high school and club basketball events. Soon enough, he had his own website. He was writing stories, conducting interviews, putting together highlight videos, handing out business cards, even running showcases. He was friends with all the players. College coaches were buddying up to him. He had real information. He was still in high school and had become a massive presence on the local and national scene. The New York Times wrote about him when he was 18. Sports Illustrated did a piece, too. His SwagAir YouTube videos’ views often hit the tens of thousands, some even the hundreds of thousands.
And then I left him and that world behind. I shut Ill. Hoops down to work for ESPN, which later shifted away from its high school sports coverage. I ended up covering hockey. I’d hear about Poneman occasionally, especially when his documentary “Shot In The Dark” took off, but I hadn’t seen him for nearly a decade.
That energetic teenager grew up. One day, I heard he had become a player agent.
Daniel Poneman is 29 now.
It’s been 15 years since his Evanston High School classmate Eric Dortch introduced him to player rankings on a website called ChicagoHoops.com and changed Poneman’s life. He fully immersed himself in the Chicago area’s high school basketball scene.
“I just passed the point where more than my half my life has been consumed by basketball than wasn’t,” Poneman said recently.
Poneman’s self-awareness was something I had to get used to as we talked on a few occasions over the last year. Hearing him describe himself as neurotic isn’t something I would have expected 10 years ago. (By the way, he is neurotic. He was excited about this story, but then began to worry that running it too close to the NBA draft and free agency would jinx him.)
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There’s still some of that kid in him — he’s still baby-faced, his enthusiasm is still dumbfounding and there’s still that passion for basketball — but he’s also grown up. He can view his past and present in the scope of someone who has lived some life. He recognizes how some college coaches were just using him when he was a kid. He can see how going to college might have been the right move at one point, but how not doing so has also benefitted him.
His first crossroads came after graduating high school, about the time I last knew him. He considered attending Northwestern and becoming a men’s basketball team manager, but he was having too much fun with his website and thought that school would only restrict him. But even then, he was starting to realize he didn’t have the resources or knowledge to transform what he was doing into a real career.
“I think when you look at my story, it’s easy to say, oh, started out, you know, child star, essentially, and then next, flash forward, he’s an NBA agent and made a movie, cool,” Poneman said. “But there was a period after high school where things were really difficult for me because it’s one thing to be successful as a high school kid. Like in the context of being the high school kid, that person is successful, that person is running a website. It’s another thing when you’re an adult and you’re supposed to support yourself and you don’t have the structure of school, you don’t have anyone telling you what to do. You’re kind of in the void.
“And I was 17, 18 years old, trying to figure it out, and it was tough. I took my lumps, you know. Like I didn’t know what direction to go. I didn’t know how to run a business. I didn’t know how to be an adult. And a lot of times, college teaches you those things. So you go and you learn how to be an adult with other people who are learning the same thing. But I was all on my own trying to figure it out. And I appreciate that period because I failed and I failed and I learned difficult lessons. But it definitely, I think, prepared me now for the position I’m in because I got a lot of real-world experience.”
Anthony Davis, right, went from being an unknown to the No. 1 player in the country after his junior high school season in Chicago. (Courtesy Daniel Poneman)Poneman was still heavy into the high school basketball scene when Anthony Davis went from an unknown to the No. 1 player in the country in the spring and summer of 2010. Basketball fans were eating up all the Davis content they could get, and Poneman formed a friendship with him. But when Davis began his NBA career in 2012, Poneman again found himself wondering what was next. He described it as an “identity crisis.”
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Around that time, a couple of Poneman’s former high school classmates, Dustin Nakao-Haider and Ben Vogel, reached out to him about doing a documentary on Orr Academy’s basketball team in the Chicago Public League. Poneman jumped on as a producer. The long-term project paid off with the documentary being shown on FOX in 2018.
Poneman had to fill up his time and his bank account in other ways, though, so he began managing a Chicago rapper named Spenzo, whom he had met through a mutual associate.
Poneman was enjoying the detour. In March 2014, Davis invited Spenzo to perform at his 21st birthday party in New Orleans. Poneman traveled for the party, and it was there that Anthony Davis’ father, Anthony Sr., dealt Poneman a reality check.
“I just felt his heart was in the basketball and not the music business,” Davis Sr. said. “So, I gave him a little bit of advice. I just told him, this rap stuff is not for you, so I think you should get back into basketball because you had a great impact on a lot of kids. You got a lot of kids exposure they didn’t have, especially with Anthony. I just told him, listen, you need to get back into basketball. That’s where your heart is, so you can find a way.”
Poneman returned home with that message in mind. He had previously created an unsigned high school senior showcase to connect players with colleges, and decided to get it rolling again. The difference this time was he raised all the money himself, so it wouldn’t cost the players anything. He just wanted to give back to the basketball community.
That showcase evolved over the ensuing years. Evan Turner, who is from Chicago and was playing in the NBA, began sponsoring it, and Poneman wondered if there was a way for him to help players while also making a living out of it.
At first, Poneman was reluctant to pursue becoming an agent.
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“Early in my career when I was young, I interacted with a lot of agents,” Poneman said. “Particularly because of Anthony and other guys, a lot of agents would reach out to me when I was younger and try to manipulate me or get me on their side or try to use me. I got early exposure to agents when I was young and really did not like them. It just felt slimy.
“I like helping people. I like helping kids. And it just didn’t sit right with me about it. So I swore early on, I’m never going to be an agent because I had my interaction with agents and did not like what I saw.”
But Poneman started to think about it differently as he got older. What if he could be different?
“Turner sponsored my showcase and I saw how many people I was able to help with the help of one NBA player,” Poneman said. “It started to click to me that, OK, maybe I can help more people if I have a bigger platform. It’s like you can help people by volunteering at a homeless shelter or you can become the mayor and help fund the homeless shelters. And I kind of realized, all right, my goal is to help people, maybe if I try a different route and start teaming up with NBA players and everything, like I could do it on a higher level than that.
“I also started to see a lot of guys that I came up with asking me for help with their careers, whether they’re asking me to be their agent or asking for help picking an agent or their agent did something wrong to them or stopped answering their calls. I started to see that a lot of these players that I came up with seemed to view me as someone that they trusted with this type of responsibility.”
Daniel Poneman is one of four co-founders of Beyond Athlete Management. (Scott Powers / The Athletic)A friend asking for help and a friend signing papers to make him his agent were two different things. Poneman suffered rejection after rejection while searching for his first client. But finally, he found someone willing to give him a chance.
Ben Moore had starred at Bolingbrook High School and went on to have a successful college career at SMU. When Moore began looking for an agent in 2017, he wasn’t sold on the people he was meeting. He knew and trusted Poneman, who took him on as his first client.
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“I knew it was going to be a big step, but I also knew I had met with other agents and I didn’t have the same feeling,” said Moore, who played with the Indiana Pacers in 2018 and is now playing in Australia. “I was OK going ahead with it because I felt this is something I would be OK figuring out together with DP. If he makes a mistake, I’m OK with that because I know he has my best interest at heart.
“DP is one of those people you come across on rare, rare occasions, almost like a commodity. One of those people you always want around you no matter what the circumstances or what the business might be. As far as the person goes, it was dope to see him grow and to see the person he is now. He’s truly like a caring dude. He’s going to look out for any and everybody.”
In 2018, Poneman connected with fellow agents Jelani Floyd, EJ Kusnyer and Mike Naiditch to co-found Beyond Athlete Management. Poneman helped the group land on the initials BAM when a receipt with those letters fell out of a Kabbalah book. The agency’s clients include NFL players Miles Sanders, Courtland Sutton, Andy Lee and Kenny Robinson Jr., and NBA players Glenn Robinson III, Josh Gray, Isaiah Hartenstein and Jae’Sean Tate.
“We decided to start our own agency and do it in a way that was rooted in integrity and having the right values and empowering players, empowering their families,” Poneman said. “Our motto, we have various ones, one is own your talent. How the players own their talent and not give it away to be exploited. Another is agents for good. It is kind of like a double entendre. We want to be your agent for good, for the rest of your career. We want to be agents for good. We want to be the agents that bring good to the industry and the world.”
Naiditch, 56, has been a player agent for 20 years. He first met Poneman when Poneman was a teenager. When the two reconnected, Naiditch knew he wanted to work with him.
“There’s so much depth to him; it’s really hard to just explain him on a phone call,” Naiditch said. “It’s one of those things where you just get a feeling. I couldn’t say it in words how I feel. Just how the receipt fell out of the book, that’s how he was to me. That’s like how I felt. He’s the receipt. He fell out and I saw him. ‘That’s him, right there. I have to be a part of that.’ This energy, this endless energy and youth, and I guess you can say he’s idealistic. It’s almost funny, I’m this old guy and old guys aren’t idealistic, so I see the youth and I see the energy and it kind of helps me, it rubs a little bit off on me. It’s fun. It keeps me waking up every day, thinking how much fun this is. That’s what he brings — the energy, optimism, ideology and just that youthful spirit.
“He actually cares so much about the clients that I’m the one who has to sort of say, we have to look at this as a business. Yes, we want to feel like a family, but that being said, this is a profession and you have to remember that because if you don’t remember that we’ll never succeed in terms of financially. He’s so invested emotionally that I would say it makes him unique. He’s not just cheering for his guys. He’s really invested in them emotionally. That’s the first thing that makes him unique.”
Tyrell Terry, right, was selected by the Dallas Mavericks in the 2020 draft. (Courtesy of Daniel Poneman)Last month, Poneman’s client Tyrell Terry was selected by the Dallas Mavericks as the 31st overall pick in the NBA Draft. Poneman joined Terry and his family in Minnesota. The moment Terry’s name was called, Poneman was looking at his phone, texting with Mark Cuban. Poneman then stood up and applauded with the rest of the room.
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“It ended up being very cool to share the moment with Ty and see all of this hard work culminate in him getting drafted by the Mavericks,” Poneman said. “It was definitely different than how I envisioned it because in a normal year we would have been in Brooklyn, you know, walking across the stage. But I think it was actually special that he got to share it with all his friends and family back home in Minnesota.
“For me, it was pretty cool just because the draft growing up was my favorite day of the year. I remember I used to go to overnight camp every year in June, and that’s when the draft would be. This was 20 years, so there was no technology. My parents used to print out the draft results and mail them to me. I used to go over them and memorize them. I just loved the draft. For me to be a part of it was really a cool moment for me as well.”
It’s those experiences that make it all worthwhile for Poneman.
“People say, like, anything you dream, you could do it,” Poneman said. “It’s true to some extent. But I was put in a lot of lucky situations. Being born in Evanston and I had a great family who supported me, my dad drove me to games. Eric Dortch showed me that website. I was born in the social media era where I was able to disseminate information really quickly to build my own personal brand and all of these things broke my way to put me in this position that I’m really lucky to be in, so I don’t take that for granted at all.
“But yeah, it’s pretty fucking cool, you know, that I get to be in this position and do this. And I don’t take that for granted. I just want to keep doing the best job I can, so that I don’t lose it. As much as I’ve gotten here, I did lose it for a period. There was a period that I was irrelevant, and I know that that could happen again if I don’t stay focused and do right by people and do the right thing. So hopefully, I’ll keep doing it.”
(Photo: Scott Powers / The Athletic)
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