Bryan Freedman, the prominent celebrity attorney, is no man to receiving disoriented calling at odd hours of the day. Some of the most well-known people in the legal profession have had their lowest points represented by the lawyer.
However, a movie star or presenter in a constitutional crisis did not appeal for assistance on the other end of the line on an April morning. Instead, it was Ryan Silver, an Junior basketball coach who had just woken up in a hospital in Las Vegas after an all-night bender.
Gold, then in his early 30s, was in Sin City at the time training one of the top teams for Pump-N-Run, the wealthy community hoops program run by the sports influence-peddling brothers, David and Dana Pump. Freedman’s brother, Spencer, was among the hundreds of young people Gold had coached, and would later go on to perform at Harvard.

The elder Freedman and the much younger instructor eventually established friendships along the way.
” There’s no one I know who’s a better connection of people”, said the lawyer, who was especially taken by Silver’s unflagging sympathy for his people and their communities, despite how difficult they could often be. He simply goes out of his way to support and treat people nicely.
Born and raised in Hollywood’s trappings, Silver had previously experienced professional victory when he had recently sold a profitable club promotion company a few years prior. After that, he had embarked on a second job as a training basketball coach, where he was also successful, at least on the court. And still, as he told Freedman that fateful day, he felt greatly lost.
” My existence was nightclubs and drinking, and I had made a lot of money,” Silver said, who had scurried between bars and games before blacking out in the doorway of his Las Vegas Hotel. Eventually, a local newspaper in California reported that he had been admitted to the ICU and had undergone procedure. That piece was n’t real, Silver said, but nevertheless, the encounter proved severe enough to function as a wake-up call.
But he dialed Freedman, who had over the years shared with Silver his own transition from drinking to being abstinence. The lawyer pleaded with Silver on the phone to pack up his suitcase promptly and board the following flight back to Los Angeles. Silver complied, and Freedman led him to the first of what may eventually get the coach’s regular Alcoholics Anonymous gatherings over the course of the following year when he landed.
” Ryan attacked treatment the way that he attacks everything”, Freedman said. Gold claims to have been awake since then and has now sponsored 40 to 50 other people as AA sponsors.
Metal left the Pump Brothers over the course of the past ten years to start his own AAU kingdom, West Coast Elite Under Armour, along with a baseball events business operating under the same name. Gold will continue to run the former business while transferring it to 3STEP Sports, a national-based company supported by Lorenzo Fertitta and Juggernaut Capital Partners.

On Friday, Silver may again be in Vegas for labor, although under much more pleasant conditions. Through his latest endeavor, Silver Waves Media, he did play host to a “power meeting” of sports influentials at the Wynn Hotel, to sympathize over” the future of NIL”. Silver claims that the event will now be able to accommodate 350 attendees, underscoring his growing influence in the dog-eat-dog recruiting industry.
The key to his success? Harmony.
” I do n’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 shot at me in every direction on Earth. I just do n’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.
He is also unreluctant 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 do n’t see the endless hard work, and that it’s very unstable”.
Indeed, there does n’t appear to be a corner of the space where Silver ca n’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 anchored he is in the people he was raised 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 does n’t hurt to give them an award. The making of the list is no doodle, consumes endless hours of research, and frequently carries the wrath of the unacknowledged, insists Yet Silver. Try as one might, you ca n’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 claimed that he did not hear from his father, who passed away in the early 2010s, after his parents split up.
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 adopted his last name. Instilling the value of treating others well and avoiding unnecessary conflict, Ryan Silver describes his stepdad as a stabilizing presence.
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 respectable athlete but not a world-class performer, and any childhood fantasies about an NBA career were quickly shattered when a team he was playing for lost by 90 points to an opponent that included 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.
However, the original plan did not call for a career in hoops.
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. Silver expressed a talent for representing talent, but he was offended by the lack of industry etiquette.
” I had a great experience there, but I also saw how some CAA agents handled and treated people,” Silver said. ” I made the choice to be kind, decent, and treat people the right way as I built my career.”
Instead, after graduating from UCLA, Silver turned his professional attention to something he already knew well, perhaps too well: the club scene.
” I had a lot of value to these Hollywood nightclub promoters because I was so connected in Malibu,” 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. By the end of the night, Pump had run up a tab well into the four figures. The alcohol was flowing. 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 Yahoo Sports investigation uncovered a ticket-scam operation at the University of Kansas that allegedly involved several athletic administrators and was “orchestrated” by the Pumps a month after his hospitalization in Las Vegas. The NCAA made changes to the NCAA’s rules that forbid coaches from making charitable donations to the Pumps ‘ foundation and forbid the brothers from running their successful 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 I might have been kicked out if I chose Adidas,” 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 were n’t, but not in the same way”.
More than 500 college players and 32 professional or collegiate coaches are among West Coast Elite Under Armour’s alumni networks, which includes 300 boys and girls ‘ teams spread throughout the western U.S.
Silver has distilled his philosophy in a self-published book called The 40-Year Plan, which counsels young basketball players and their families to create visualization boards of their ultimate objectives and to always approach each situation with an “attitude of gratitude.”
Silver sold his events business to 3STEP Sports in the early stages of the pandemic and established Silver Waves Media, which was initially geared toward providing resources for basketball coaches to advance their careers.
Silver was a reluctant late-comer to NIL despite being positioned to pounce right away.
” 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 did n’t believe it was real”.
However, after watching so many of his former West Coast Elite athletes sign NIL contracts, Silver decided it was time to step up and use his network. ( After a decade-long hiatus, he has also recently returned to coaching AAU ball. )
In the future, he intends to make his Las Vegas power conference a yearly gimmick that draws crowds of 5,000. 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.
Silver Waves released its most recent list a few months ago, honoring the “70 most influential people in the NIL space,” many of whom are scheduled to attend this week. They will mix and mingle with coaches, collective operators and athletes, and–if things go as planned–the Pump Brothers.