NBA Skills Coach Drew Hanlen on Building Pure Sweat Basketball’s Brand

It takes more than just being the first one on the court and the last one off to be amongst the NBA’s best. It requires a focused approach to conditioning and skills building. That’s why elite NBA talent like Joel Embiid, Bradley Beal, Jayson Tatum, and more choose to work with coach Drew Hanlen and Pure Sweat Basketball. 

Hanlen spends his days breaking down his clients’ game film and finding ways to build on their game. As the CEO of Pure Sweat Basketball, Hanlen also designs training programs for coaches and trainers to help take their own athletes to the next level. 

Hanlen couldn’t have built this type of portfolio with bad social content. 

“Branding is so important,” Hanlen stated. “I think that right now, in the content era, so many people put out bad content, which can actually negatively impact your brand. So for us, the first thing that we do is we make sure that we’re documenting what’s really happening — we’re not out there creating fairytale stories or trying to fake what’s happening, we want to give an in-depth look of the grind that’s really going. We call these moments ‘the unseen hours.’”

Hanlen records and stores every second that he and his clients are working together on the court, which can be up to 70 hours a week, if not more. Hanlen also has a library of game film from his clients that he works off of. Put all this together, and Hanlen finds himself with roughly a terabyte of footage a week that needs storing.

For this, Hanlen puts his trust in Air, a cloud storage and collaboration tool. With Hanlen being on the road to a significant extent to fit his clients’ demands, this also eliminates the need to travel with bulky analog storage solutions like portable hard drives. On Air, Hanlen can find relevant content with ease and strategize around social media on the fly. 

“At Pure Sweat, our mantra is just help as many players, coaches, and trainers as possible,” Hanlen says. “So when it comes to content, anytime that we have a soundbite or have a clip that we think is going to impact the lives of those three sectors (the players, coaches, and trainers), we try to post it. Some people might have content schedules that they’re sticking to way ahead of time, for us it’s more so about getting people the best content in real time as we go.”

Having all of this footage on hand and easily searchable through Air has also made maintaining Pure Sweat Basketball’s social media presence much easier. Hanlen and his team were able to easily find moments from old games and training sessions that were evergreen to their target consumers. 

“Just during the last three months, our Instagram account has grown by I think 50,000 followers,” Hanlen recalled. “We’ve also had tons of growth on Facebook and YouTube and we just started a TikTok, which has grown to over 150,000 followers after only being in business for maybe three or four months.”

Hanlen added that the best thing a trainer can do is get results. With a proper video storage solution in Air, this goal is much more attainable.

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