Hoop dreams: Mount Pearl woman courts NBA talent as one of the league’s youngest agents | CBC News

“My ultimate goal is to be the general manager of an NBA team,” she told CBC News in a recent interview.

This year one of the league’s youngest player agents recently landed her first client three consecutive 10-day contracts with the Los Angeles Clippers.

“This has been his dream his entire life and just being able to be the one to make that happen for somebody that deserves it so much is the most surreal thing that could possibly happen,” she said.

It’s a long way from Mount Pearl to the NBA

But this isn’t the story of overnight success.

Leawood has loved basketball her entire life and, as a player, was scouted by universities in Canada and the United States. 

She chose to stay closer to home and play for Memorial University in St. John’s, but a shift in coaches with the program prompted her to switch from playing hoops to running track. 

Not long afterward, she moved from working toward a bachelor of commerce degree to a bachelor of business administration and, wishing to be in a bigger city, moved to Toronto in 2018 while continuing her MUN classes online.

Leawood fell fast and hard for life in a city with a National Basketball Association team.

“There are very few jobs in the world in basketball, let alone in Canada,” she said. 

But that wasn’t going to stop her from finding one, and she took an unpaid internship at a sports media company while she was completing her degree. 

“I got all the connections that I could find at the time through interviewing people, and I used those connections that I had made to actually get my first job,” she said.

She began working with the Guelph Nighthawks of the Canadian Elite Basketball League — the same league the Newfoundland Growlers will play in this summer — and is also an assistant coach with the Newfoundland Rogues of the American Basketball Association.

But that was just a stepping stone for her rise in the world of professional basketball. The next step was a steeper one, but she didn’t shy away from the challenge. 

“The easiest job to make in the basketball industry is to represent players,” she said.

The only problem for her is that a lot of entry-level professional basketball jobs were tied to management programs offered by Ryerson University and the University of Toronto, making it difficult for the Memorial University graduate to get her foot in the door.

“Nobody wanted to give me an internship or an entry-level position,” Leawood said. “I went on the National Basketball Player’s Association website and figured out, step by step, how to apply to be an agent.”

Leawood said she studied the 600-page collective bargaining agreement between the league and the players association, a dry document filled with legal terminology, and “understood absolutely nothing.”

“The second time I read it, I understood a little bit more because I understood how things were written. I just started highlighting questions that I had and researched those.”

In February 2021 she was approved to write the player-agent exam, which she said is an opportunity given to only about 200 people a year and has just a 50 per cent pass rate.

It was very much like a fairy tale.– Stacey Leawood

The next month she learned she had passed but decided not to pursue being a player agent at the time, preferring to continue her work with the Guelph Nighthawks, and she spent last summer learning how a professional basketball team operates.

It was in the CEBL where she found her first client, 27-year-old Xavier Moon, who had played with the Edmonton Stingers.

“We had a whole bunch of mutual friends and had known each other previously, so I decided to reach out and just see if it would interest him at all for me to take a stab at getting him to the NBA,” she said.

Leawood recalls Moon telling her he had nothing to lose, but making the jump to the NBA wasn’t easy.

It began with Moon signing with the Los Angeles Clippers to contract for the G-League, the NBA’s minor league organization.

The two took their talents to Las Vegas, and Leawood began working the phones while Moon showcased his talents on the court. 

By Christmas, Moon was still stuck in the G-league and Leawood headed home for the holidays. But as the clock inched toward midnight on Christmas Eve, her phone rang: it was the president of the Los Angeles Clippers, she said, telling her they were going to give Moon a shot.

“Merry Christmas! So it was very much like a fairy tale.”

She booked the next flight to Los Angeles to see her client take the court. 

 

Moon thrived in his 30 days with the Clippers until players moved out of COVID-19 protocols and he went back to the G-League — but with his and Leawood’s dreams realized.

Now the pair are working to find a longer contract with another NBA team.

Until then, she’s eyeballing more clients to represent — looking for more players like Moon.

“I want to take guys that otherwise without me wouldn’t have a chance and get them to live their dreams,” she said.

Leawood hopes to partner with a player agency, someday.

“For now, I’ve been doing it by myself and it’s been working for me.”

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