Relax and watch qualified sports businessmen give skateboarding what it needs

On September 1, ESPN's Alyssa Roenigk reported that former Golden State Warrior and current free agent, Gary Payton II, is set to launch the Skate Board Association¹ (SBA), a "coed, six-team street skateboard league" with an "inaugural 10-game season next summer in Big Bear Lake, California."

Payton II, along with being a co-founder, will serve as "director of VIP relations and an owner of one of the league's six teams, which will each feature six athletes – three women and three men – plus reserves and coaches. Men and women will receive equal pay."

According to the initial ESPN report, "The league has signed 18 athletes to nonexclusive contracts, including 2020 Olympic silver medalist Kelvin Hoefler, SLS Select Series champion Manny Santiago, X Games skateboard street gold medalists Ryan Decenzo and Pamela Rosa and silver medalist Samarria Brevard."

The SBA says those athletes will be paid salaries and bonuses, instead of the traditional purse allotments based on contest placement, and "top draft picks will receive six-figure salaries... the lowest picks will earn salaries in the mid five figures," along with revenue from merch sales.

On its face, that all sounds compelling, especially the remuneration. Financial instability has become an accepted reality of professional skateboarding.

It also raises a number of questions. The first: Gary Payton II? The shooting guard, who's expected to resign with Golden State for the 2025-2026 season, told ESPN that "Growing up, I always wanted to be a skateboarder. The skate park was right next to the basketball court... I'd skate there with my friends and they'd skate the park and I'd hoop."

With that long-held interest, the idea appeared to be a no-brainer when it was brought to him by his business partners Royce Campbell and Sheldon Lewis. "I was like, 'Why hasn't there been a professional league like the NFL, NBA or NHL for skateboarding? Let's change the sports game and the skateboard game.'"

While that does overlook Mike Mo Capaldi's Professional Skateboarding League experiment from earlier this year, as well as the X Games' announcement of the X Games League (XGL) in June of last year (though, the XGL is technically interdisciplinary), it also brushes past Lewis' previous project, the Premier Skateboard Association (PSA), which held three events across 2021 and into 2022 under the series banner of Backyard Skate Battle.

In May of 2022, the PSA put out a press release that referred to themselves as the "world's first true skateboarding league" and announced a world tour featuring "30 of the biggest international names in men's and women's street skateboarding including 14 Olympians." The tour was set to kick off at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, California, on July 9, 2022. Tickets had been on sale for months in advance when the event was postponed in early July and never rebooked.

The PSA Instagram account appears to have had the majority of its content removed in the years since. The most recent remaining post, from April 22, 2022, is a video package celebrating Earth Day that features Manny Santiago promoting a partnership with Energy Independence Now, a seemingly inactive or defunct "environmental nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles."

Comments on the post, made a year after the SoFi Stadium event's postponement, allege the PSA had yet to refund ticket holders.

The PSA's lone Facebook page review calls it a "Scam."

There is no available information about why the event was postponed or if tickets were ever refunded. According to Lewis' LinkedIn page, the PSA, for which he served as its Chief Executive Officer, shuttered in February 2023.

In May 2023, Lewis' work experience section was updated again, as he assumed the role of CEO at the "sports media and live events company" I Don't Miss (IDM) alongside co-founder and COO Royce Campbell. Campbell's LinkedIn details a career of creative consultancy, production, and talent relations, which includes a role as "Sr. Consultant" to Payton II since 2017. From there, one assumes, the Skate Board Association was born.

It's still relatively early days for the SBA, but it's hard to make heads, tails, or dollars and cents of the proposed league. They have a high-wattage public-facing partner (for skateboarding, at least) in Gary Payton II, they are holding events where skaters receive SBA-branded varsity jackets and press conferences in Big Bear, "the home of the SBA's flagship arena, training complex, and media hub," and are promising some seriously big things (and contracts), but it's unclear who will be paying for it all.

In contrast, when X Games announced the XGL in June of last year, they named their financial backers and provided loose but convincing details on how they foresee the business model taking shape.

Backed by MSP Sports Capital (MSP), a Najafi Cos. portfolio company, the X Games League will provide a year-round international competition calendar for X Games that will enable athletes to earn compensation beyond the $2.4 million already awarded through existing prize purses.

“In essence, we’ve used Formula One as a model for this new X Games League,” said Jeff Moorad, Executive Chairman of X Games and Principal of MSP Sports Capital. “To that end, we are creating a year-round calendar and introducing new commercial opportunities to accelerate the overall growth of X Games. These opportunities will provide a secure and sustainable future for our most important stakeholders – the athletes. By leveraging the incredibly valuable X Games brand, we will create a durable, global business that will be good for athletes, fans, investors and sponsors.”

"MSP and X Games will secure investors for these new teams. Team investors and XGL athletes will have a platform from which to build and generate additional revenue streams via sponsorships and team-specific merchandise. In an industry first, XGL athletes will be provided with a level of stability that includes guaranteed compensation as well as new commercial opportunities."

The SBA's competition format has also yet to be revealed, but one assumes it will follow the Street League Skateboarding and Olympic Street Skateboarding models, considering it is a "street skateboarding league." However, somewhat confusingly, an animation on the SBA website showcases what appears to be an AI-generated "park" style course.

Among other questions that remain is whether it is a conflict of interest for Payton II to be an SBA co-founder, its director of VIP relations, and a team owner. I reached out to Campbell this week with an interview request and was directed to the company's PR lead, but did not hear back by the time of publication.

What we do know is that the SBA's current team owners are Payton II, Samarria Brevard, Pamela Rosa, Robert Neal, and Manny Santiago. Whether they have a legitimate financial stake in the teams or are figureheads is unknown.

When it comes to the competitors who will fill out those teams, an SBA press release published on September 1 named 18 athletes "slated for the 2026 draft," including multiple Olympic and X Games medalists. A few days later, the SBA published a statement via Instagram Story set to Kanye West's "No Child Left Behind" with the headline "To Our Beloved Global Skateboarding Community."

The athletes named in the Sept. 1 announcement are those in which the SBA is expecting to participate in the SBA draft and or season. To be clear, the SBA has not released any information and or statements that concretely state any athletes outside of our athlete ownership are confirmed and signed to the SBA, nor do we need or plan to ever exploit athletes to gain notoriety." (Underline theirs.)

That would contradict ESPN's original framing of the 18 athletes having been signed to "non-exclusive contracts." Overall, it's a strange statement, which is something of an SBA staple. The team owner's introduction posts on Instagram all include the same motivational affirmation:

Be delusional enough to believe it's possible.
Be disciplined enough to prove them wrong.
I am...
[SBA logo]

The SBA's homepage has splashed across it in big, bold type, "THE FUTURE OF PROFESSIONAL SKATEBOARDING IS HERE!" Below that reads "PRESSURE IS A PRIVILEGE" and "COME FORGE YOUR LEGACY." "POWERING THE PASSION" is thrown in for good measure.

This hollow, low-effort sloganeering is remarkably similar in its say-nothingness to how Lewis describes the Premier Skateboard Association on LinkedIn.

Premier Skateboard Association (PSA) is the first professional skateboarding league that unites the sports rapidly growing fanbase that was born into digital bridging the progression from Web 2 to Web 3 with its top athletes under the banner of pure competition and authentic skate culture. With its unique product, distribution, High Meta Valued assets, multiple lines of NFT opportunities and brand integrations in IRL and the Meta verse, PSA is poised to shake up the Global multi-billion-dollar skate & culture industry and redefine the culture into a new era.

What?

Again, we have seen very little from the SBA. They may be up to something genuinely interesting and impactful, but it's hard not to be skeptical when the people running it communicate almost exclusively via buzzword-laden promises and platitudes. The September 1 press release calls the SBA "a groundbreaking initiative set to transform global sports, youth culture, and innovation." That's an incredible claim to make, just as it was to claim the PSA was "poised to shake up the Global multi-billion-dollar skate & culture industry and redefine the culture into a new era."

In April, months before the SBA's official launch, the company's Instagram account shared a Story featuring a photo of Campbell and Lewis alongside what looks to be an excerpt from an article in the "finance" section of the Sports Business Journal.

The Evolution Skateboarding Deserves
The Skate Board Association (SBA) is geared up to bring the world of Skateboarding and its athletes what they have been longing for all along. Ushering in a New Era of Skate & Culture, lead by Sheldon Lewis, Royce Campbell and Gary Payton II, its safe to say the SBA is here to stay.

I could not find any evidence of that article existing. The purported excerpt, rife with spelling and grammar errors and a bizarrely patronizing tone, is strikingly similar to a comment made by the SBA Instagram account in response to a user asking, "How many years has Royce skated?" in the comments on Campbell's SBA introduction post.

How many years did David Stern or Adam Silver play Professional Basketball? , How many years has Roger Goodell played Professional Football? , How many years has Rob Manfred played Professional Baseball? — 3 of the Most Powerful Leagues in the World have been built and ran by people with 0% of professional experience in the Sport they are running... relax and watch qualified sports businessmen give Skateboarding what it needs—❤️

The SBA says it is giving skateboarding what it needs and is the evolution skateboarding deserves. That is not overly encouraging. Neither was Payton II when he tried explaining to ESPN why other pro athletes would want to invest in his project and become SBA team owners. 

"To be an owner of an SBA skate team is bringing us back to playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater, picking the guys, picking the brands to skate for. So many people have that connection to skateboarding."

Those are not the same thing. Professional skateboarding does need something, though. It is not a viable career path for a majority of the incredibly talented athletes who put their bodies on the line for it, as Payton II, who is a high-level athlete in a league that makes money hand over fist, speaks to correctly.

"I want the skaters to be valued, and to get them the right sponsorships so they can take care of their bodies, take care of their families, buy their own crib... If I can change the game for them, that's a win."

Can the Skate Board Association achieve that? Certainly not at scale, as most professional skateboarders don't compete. But if it supports the handful of skaters who do for however long the SBA lasts, that's a good thing. Is the SBA "the future of professional skateboarding... " as its website claims?

It's going to be hard for any organization to be forward-looking when they don't have a grasp on the present. "Skateboarding has always been a culture of creativity and resilience, and the SBA represents a new era where that culture is elevated onto a global stage." Payton II is quoted as saying in the SBA press release.

Skateboarding has long been on the global stage — it's an Olympic sport. The stage doesn't get more global than that. If the SBA hopes to gain any traction or legitimacy in a sport that trades big on cultural authenticity, they'll need to shift gears. How does a person not take the unearned bravado, motivational poster tripe, and hustle-bro-mides plastered across all of their messaging as anything but warning signs? That's without mentioning the seemingly fabricated media spot and a previous "league" in the PSA that never got off the ground and allegedly bilked ticketholders.

With this introduction, the SBA comes off as farcical at best. At worst, it smacks of grift. I sincerely hope it's not. Skateboarding is better for athletes and fans when there are more opportunities. The SBA's inaugural season is set to begin this spring. We'll see if their delusion and discipline are enough to prove the doubters wrong.

¹Also, I get what they're doing, but it's "skateboard," not "skate board." C'mon.