Bryan Freedman, the prominent celebrity lawyer, is no stranger to receiving panicked calls at odd hours of the day. The attorney has represented some of the highest of high-profile individuals at their lowest of lows.
But on an early morning in April 2011, the cry for help on the other end of the line did not come from a movie star or broadcaster in a legal crisis. Rather, it belonged to an AAU basketball coach named Ryan Silver, who had just awoken in a Las Vegas hospital after an all-night bender.
Silver, then in his early 30s, was in Sin City at the time coaching one of the premier squads for Pump-N-Run, the elite grassroots hoops program run by the basketball influence-peddling brothers, David and Dana Pump. Freedman’s son, Spencer, was among the hundreds of young players Silver had coached, and would eventually go on to play at Harvard.
Along the way, the elder Freedman struck up a friendship with the much younger coach.
“There’s no one I know who’s a better connector of people,” said the litigator, who was particularly taken by Silver’s unflagging compassion for his players and their families, despite how difficult they could sometimes be. “He just goes out of his way to treat people well and to help people.”
Born and reared in the trappings of Hollywood, Silver had already enjoyed professional success at a young age, selling a lucrative club promotion business a few years earlier. He had subsequently thrown himself into a second career as a prep basketball coach, where he also was thriving, at least on the court. And yet, as he told Freedman that fateful morning, he felt deeply lost.
“I had made a bunch of money, and my life was nightclubs and drinking,” said Silver, who had caromed between clubs and casinos before blacking out in the hallway of his Las Vegas Hotel. One local paper in California would later report he had been admitted to the ICU and undergone surgery. That part wasn’t true, Silver said, but nonetheless, the experience proved dire enough to serve as a wake-up call.
So he rang Freedman, who over the years had shared with Silver his own journey from alcoholism to sobriety. On the phone, the lawyer implored Silver to pack up his suitcase immediately and get on the next flight back to Los Angeles. Silver complied, and upon landing, Freedman escorted him to the first of what would become daily Alcoholics Anonymous meetings the coach would attend over the next year.
“Ryan attacked recovery the way that he attacks everything,” Freedman said. Silver says has been sober ever since and now serves as an AA sponsor of 40 to 50 others.
Over the last decade, Silver broke away from the Pump Brothers to create his own AAU empire, West Coast Elite Under Armour, along with a basketball events company under the same umbrella. In 2020, Silver sold the latter business to 3STEP Sports—a nationwide operator backed by billionaire Lorenzo Fertitta and Juggernaut Capital Partners—while continuing to operate it.
On Friday, Silver will again be in Vegas for work, although under far more pleasant circumstances. Through his latest venture, Silver Waves Media, he will play host to a “power conference” of basketball influentials at the Wynn Hotel, to commiserate over “the future of NIL.” With its original plans to host 100, Silver says the event is now expected to field a crowd of 350, underscoring his increasing influence in the dog-eat-dog world of college basketball recruiting.
The key to his success? Harmony.
“I don’t fight with anybody,” Silver told Sportico in a series of interviews, ascribing his go-along-to-get-along approach as a conscious reaction to the toxicity he has witnessed and experienced since childhood. “People have taken every shot at me on planet Earth. I just don’t fight with them no matter what.”
Silver speaks quite openly of his personal struggles, from his “troubled youth” to his years-long addiction battles with cocaine and alcohol.
“He’s one of those people who is not afraid to expose his vulnerabilities,” said Silver’s older brother, Ross.
Nor is he reluctant to give others their due. Indeed, appreciation is the corporate ethos of Silver Waves, as epitomized by its stock-in-trade “impact” lists, which it blazons across social media, and that frequently shine a spotlight on the lesser-known creatures within the hoops ecosystem.
“People see the glitz and glamor [of coaching],” Ryan Silver said. “They don’t see the endless hard work, and that it’s very unstable.”
Indeed, there doesn’t appear to be a corner of the space where Silver can’t find something or someone—or 70 someones—worthy of kudos. To date, Silver Waves has identified 37 different groups (and counting) to shout out, from Division III head coaches, to men’s basketball support staffers, to mid-major women’s basketball assistant coaches.
What further distinguishes Silver’s lists from those of most other basketball taxonomists—whether it be KenPom, On3 or the NCAA’s tournament selection committee—is his resistance to the almighty allure of ranking those on it. The Silver Waves way, he insists, is about community, not hierarchy.
“For a business that is cutthroat and about putting people down, Ryan is the opposite,” said Greg Kristof, a one-time rival event operator of Silver’s who has since become a close business partner. “It is amazing how grounded he is considering the people he grew up around.”
As a networking or marketing tool, the lists seem to serve a fairly straightforward purpose: If you want somebody to show up at, say, your power lunch, it doesn’t hurt to give them an award. Yet Silver insists that the list-making is no doodle, consuming endless hours of research and often incurring the wrath of the unacknowledged. Try as one might, you can’t please everybody.
But Silver, 45, is well-practiced at pathos.
His biological father, Silver said, was a well-credentialed plastic surgeon but “really bad human being,” who physically and mentally abused him. Silver said after his parents split, he did not see or speak again to his father, who died in the early 2010s.
When Silver was 13, his mother Kimberly, a Harvard-educated real estate developer, got remarried to Arthur Silver, the noted Hollywood television writer producer. Silver adopted both Ryan and his brother Ross, both of whom took his last name. Ryan Silver describes his stepdad as a stabilizing presence who instilled the value of treating others well and avoiding unnecessary conflict.
Silver attended Malibu High School, where the student body teemed with celebrity offspring (Michael Landon’s daughter, Mel Gibson’s children) and where he played varsity basketball. Silver was a decent athlete but no world-beater, and any childhood delusions of an NBA future were promptly extinguished the summer of his sophomore year, when a team he was playing on lost by 90 points to an opponent featuring future NBA All-Star Paul Pierce. Duly chastened, Silver turned to coaching, first volunteering to run an eighth-grade boys team while still in high school and later, as a freshman undergrad at UCLA, stepping in as interim head coach for Malibu High’s boys varsity squad.
But a career in hoops was not the original plan.
During his college summers, Silver interned in the mailroom of Creative Artists Agency, and says he later served as an assistant for the firm’s famous co-founder, Michael Ovitz. Though Silver felt he had a knack for the work of representing talent, he was taken aback by the industry etiquette–or lack thereof.
“I had a great experience there, but I saw the way that some of the agents at CAA acted and treated people,” Silver said. “I chose as I built my career to be kind and decent and treat people the right way.”
Instead, after graduating from UCLA, Silver turned his professional attention to something he already knew well, perhaps too well: the club scene.
“I was so connected in Malibu that I had a lot of value to these Hollywood nightclub promoters,” Silver said. “And they would hire me to bring celebrities, you know, kids of celebrities, to their nightclubs.”
What began as freelance work that “paid extremely well,” eventually led Silver to found his own company, Silver Lion Productions. One night in 2005, Silver was at one of his client clubs when Dana Pump showed up along with an entourage of about two dozen that included, by Silver’s recollection, UCLA’s head men’s and women’s basketball coaches at the time and actor Denzel Washington. The alcohol was flowing and by the end of the night, Pump had run up a tab well into the four-figures. Silver, in turn, paid for the whole bill.
“He did the right thing,” Pump said. “He was a mensch.”
That act of munificence would come to re-chart Silver’s professional life. Not long after, he latched on as an assistant coach for Pump-N-Run.
“I had never seen that high a level of basketball,” Silver said. “Now I’m watching [future] NBA All-Stars, and I’m mesmerized.”
In 2008, after selling his club promotion business, Silver became head boys varsity coach at Rolling Hills Prep, in San Pedro. Two years later, he took over at Sierra Canyon School, where he won coach-of-the-year honors while guiding the program to a state title. By then, he had been promoted to head coach of the Pump’s top AAU team and as he tells it, was “essentially running their whole organization.”
A month after his hospitalization in Las Vegas, a Yahoo Sports investigation uncovered a ticket scalping operation at the University of Kansas, which involved multiple athletic administrators that was reportedly “orchestrated” by the Pumps. In the fallout, the NCAA adopted rules changes that forbid coaches from donating to the Pumps’ charitable foundation and disallowed the brothers from running their profitable coaching and athletics executive search firm while also coaching AAU.
With the Pumps scandalized, Silver left to form West Coast Elite, taking a number of Pump-N-Run players with him. Needless to say, there was some friction.
“I worked for the Pumps for five years,” Silver said. ”Obviously, they were very unhappy that I left.”
In an interview, Dana Pump acknowledged being “discouraged” by his disciple’s departure.
Hoping not to poke the bear any more than necessary, Silver said he declined to partner with Adidas—which was already sponsoring Pump-N-Run—and instead went with Under Armour.
“The Pumps were so powerful that I thought if I went with Adidas, they might have me kicked out,” Silver said.
Over the next decade, he built his company into a national AAU juggernaut, one that arguably supplanted that of the Pumps.
“Ryan was about the kids and about the parents,” said Freedman, whose son was among those that followed Silver from Pump-N-Run. “I’m not saying that the Pumps weren’t, but not in the same way.”
West Coast Elite Under Armour currently fields 300 boys’ and girls’ teams spread throughout the western U.S., and its alumni networks include more than 500 college players and 32 pro or collegiate coaches.
Silver has distilled his philosophy in a self-published book, 40-Year Plan, which encourages young basketball players and their families to make visualization boards of their ultimate goals and to always proceed with an “attitude of gratitude.”
In early 2020, right as the pandemic was shutting down the world, Silver sold his events business to 3STEP Sports and launched Silver Waves Media, initially focused on providing resources for basketball coaches to advance their careers.
Despite being positioned to pounce from the start, Silver was a hesitant late-comer to NIL.
“I’ve been in this space for 15 to 20 years, and I’ve seen everything, so I was kind of skeptical,” he said. “I didn’t believe it was real.”
However, after seeing so many of his former West Coast Elite athletes sign NIL contracts, Silver decided that it was time to get off the sidelines and bring his network to bear. (After a decade-long hiatus, he has also recently returned to coaching AAU ball.)
He intends to make his Las Vegas power conference the kind of annual staple that draws crowds of 5,000 in future years. It’s a tall order in a competitive environment, but Silver has the connections—as of last week, his phone held over 15,800 contacts–and an abundance of good will.
A few months ago, Silver Waves released its latest list recognizing the “70 most impactful people in the NIL space,” many of whom are expected to be on hand this week. They will mix and mingle with coaches, collective operators and athletes, and–if things go as planned–the Pump Brothers.
