Napheesa Collier is the recently crowned victor of the first-ever Unrivaled 1v1 basketball tournament — and she's proving yet again that she brings much more than elite basketball skills to the table.
Collier was awarded $200,000 after winning the tournament. Her victory also secured an additional $10,000 for her Lunar Owls BC teammates (Cameron Brink, Allisha Gray, Courtney Williams, Skylar Diggins-Smith, and Shakira Austin, who are each also benefitting from the league's average salary of $222,222), and now Collier has decided to gift $100,000 of the prize money to her training and performance staff and the team's assistant coaches.
As reported by ESPN, Collier made the decision to share half of her prize money almost as soon as she won, something that doesn't really surprise fans of the 6'1" UConn alum.
Who coaches the Lunar Owls BC in Unrivaled?
The Lunar Owls BC is coached by NBA and WNBA skills coach DJ Sackmann. He's the brain behind #Hoopstudy, an online platform for basketball education. According to his website, Sackmann has also hosted basketball events and clinics in the USA, Israel, China, Russia, Vienna, Australia, Czech Republic and Turkey.
Unrivaled hasn't shared a definitive list of each team's assistant coaches and related staff, but in early January, Kenny Gillon's AAU team announced one of their own had joined the women's professional league as an assistant coach for the Lunar Owls.
"Congrats to former breakdown stand out Maggie Rosario on being named the assistant coach for the lunar owls who are part of the hottest new pro women’s basketball league," a post on the company's Instagram page reads.
Maggie Skillz is also the CEO of the Ballers Lab Women's League, a women's league in Miami.
Napheesa Collier is trained by her husband, Alex Bazzell
Most of Unrivaled's performance staff hasn't been shared, but the Lynx forward has been trained by her husband, Alex Bazzell, since she was in college. Bazzell actually began training back in 2013 when he was playing overseas in Germany, and he started his own training company in St. Louis the same year.
In December, Bazzell (who is also president of the league) told SB Nation that Unrivaled "worked from a business perspective" from the beginning.
"It’s just meant to space the floor, showcase talent, be ultra-competitive, somewhat be a yin and yang compared to the WNBA and their product," he explained. "Both really complement each other in the grand scheme of things."