De’Aaron Fox got the news two years ago in Charlotte while he was in town for NBA All-Star Weekend: Chris Gaston, his long-time friend, had passed the certification test to become an NBA agent. It was a moment a long time in the making.
The two had worked together for a decade; Fox, the ascendant star trekking from Houston to the University of Kentucky to the NBA; Gaston, his basketball skills trainer.
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Their relationship blossomed from professional to almost familial, and over time had come to an understanding. Gaston wanted to become an agent, to represent Fox and Damyean Dotson, another Houston-bred player in the league. Fox supported him. Once Gaston was certified, he would leave his current agency, Catalyst Sports, to be his star client.
Now the moment had arrived. There was no apprehension – not about working with a close friend, nor joining a new agency and being represented by someone with no prior experience. When Gaston told him it was official, Fox was certain.
“We have the contract here,” he remembers telling Gaston. “We can do it today. We can do it right now.”
A decade ago, Gaston was an AAU coach and basketball junkie, working out kids by the dozens. Today, he is the head of the Family First agency, with one max-contract client on his roster and three players in all (former NBA player Eric Moreland is currently playing in China; Nerlens Noel signed with Gaston in January but has since signed with another agent).
Gaston might be unique among his peers. How many agents can say they started training their clients on the basketball court and now represent them in multi-million dollar negotiations?
It is, he hopes, the beginning of slow growth for his firm, one he hopes to run as a close-knit outfit even as he looks outside the family.
The business, like many others, is bifurcating. The biggest names are constantly growing larger, trying to add even more scale. CAA Sports added a basketball coaches division last winter. Klutch Sports, run by Rich Paul, partnered with UTA. Bill Duffy is now an adviser to William Morris Endeavor, and the Hollywood agency has taken a stake in his company.
Gaston wants to run Family First in a way at odds with that approach. He wants to empower the people he believes are overlooked when a mega agent swoops in, as he says he once was.
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“There’s nothing wrong with following the trend and wanting to be one of many,” Gaston said. “That’s OK. Nothing wrong with that. It is a story of David versus Goliath. Because we’re doing this off of tears, blood, sweat, hard work and a lot of prayer.”
Gaston grew up in Houston and returned there after playing lower-level college basketball at Park University. His father was an elementary school teacher, and Gaston received his first break when one of his father’s former students, Tommy Mason-Griffin, called him to train together. Mason-Griffin later became a McDonald’s All-American.
Gaston then began Houston Preps, a catch-all website for his player development work and AAU program by the same name. There he began working with a then-teenage Fox and Dotson, his wife’s cousin.
While he was primarily a trainer, he never thought of himself as one. “Trainer was just a tagline of who I was,” he said. “That was some percentile of who I was.” Instead, he saw himself as a mentor to the people who worked with him.
Kings point guard De’Aaron Fox is one of Gaston’s three clients as well as his first max-contract player. (Melissa Majchrzak / NBAE via Getty Images)That, more than anything, explains why he moved to Corvallis, Ore., in 2013 to live with Eric Moreland, an Oregon State forward who had just been suspended 14 games by the NCAA. Moreland had been a client of Gaston’s – another Texas kid who found success – and he was in trouble, so Gaston stuck around for a semester.
It wound up providing his first glimpse at life at basketball’s highest level. Moreland declared for the NBA Draft in 2014 and, like he always had, leaned on Gaston for advice. Gaston became Moreland’s de facto intermediary, taking meetings with agents and eventually helping Moreland make a final selection. He joined Moreland in Florida for the pre-draft process and fielded calls from interested teams. Moreland would eventually go undrafted, but the process opened Gaston’s eyes to how much higher he could climb.
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All the while, he continued to train Fox and Dotson. When they each signed with agent Happy Walters of Catalyst Sports upon entering the 2017 NBA draft, Gaston was working with the company, too. Less than a decade after he started training high schoolers, he says he was now running the agency’s pro days and pre-draft process.
Gradually, though, he grew dissatisfied. He said he asked to have more responsibility and to be included in decision-making for players with whom he had a relationship.
“I’m like, hey, man, I’m doing all the work,” Gaston said. “I brought the player to this company. I want to be involved on everything that’s going on with this player, emails, anything with marketing, anything with a shoe deal. Happy Walters, he couldn’t see that vision.”
Gaston felt disrespected and unheard. He said he voiced his opinion to Walters, who declined The Athletic’s request to discuss his relationship with Gaston due to ongoing litigation.
“Unfortunately, I don’t think he took me serious,” Gaston said of Walters.
“Even if you wanted to put me in the box as a trainer — OK, everybody knows I’m De’Aaron Fox’s trainer — and on the first day of pre-draft he tried to get De’Aaron to work out with two or three other trainers. I’m like, that’s ludicrous. There were a lot of things I felt and I’ve seen as well in a lot of other agencies where they try to separate the player and the people who helped him get to where he was. I wasn’t OK with that. I wasn’t OK with that at all.”
Gaston says that is why he decided to branch out and start his own agency. “I’ve been in this business long enough,” he said of his mindset. “I know the contacts, the players trust me, I might as well cross over full time and get that certification, get that piece of paper.”
(When reached for comment by The Athletic, Walters declined to discuss his relationship with Gaston due to ongoing litigation.)
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Once he did, Fox and Dotson were ready to join him. To them, it was a natural transition. Fox felt Gaston was prepared with a network of contacts around the league; he recalled the Kings’ general manager at the time, Vlade Divac, already calling Gaston whenever the team had questions about its star point guard.
And while Dotson wanted to repay the faith that Gaston showed in him so many years ago, when Dotson couldn’t even see his own potential, it was about practicality more than anything.
“Chris was the reason we was there,” Dotson said. “He put in a word and had us over there. He brought us with him, basically. At that point he was not my agent, but he basically was. He’s the guy in charge of us being over there right now. When he told us, ‘Yo, I think I’m going to get my certificate and become an agent,’ it was no question. Why wouldn’t he? Why wouldn’t I sign with him? Or why wouldn’t Fox sign with him? That was no question.”
No matter the circumstances of how Gaston came to represent Fox and Dotson, the three say their relationship has not changed. He still cares for them as he did before. He still sends video clips and works them out on the court occasionally.
That closeness can make outsiders wary. Fox believes, however, that any naysayers are ignoring the greatest benefit that comes with such an arrangement: trust.
“A lot of the times, at least we feel with agents, it’s an agent doing it for the money, obviously,” he said. “Probably don’t know their client as much as someone else would. We were like, ‘Let’s cut out that person. Let’s have it so that our whole group is people that we know and love and we’ve been around.’ That’s how we grew it. These people know us extremely personally. We know each other on an extremely personal level. For us working together — people say don’t mix family with work and blah blah blah — but for us, since we’re on the same page, we didn’t see a problem with working together. This last year and a half has been much better than the first year and a half that I had someone else doing it.”
That philosophy doesn’t stop with Gaston. Fox’s high school coach is now his manager. His best friend is his personal assistant. It is an active choice to give power to the people who helped Fox get to the NBA.
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And, for Gaston, it is a bedrock of Family First. He wants to continue to keep bringing more people into the fold who would not otherwise have an official voice, instead of shutting them out, as he felt he once was.
“There’s no reason they helped the player from ages one to 20, now that they’re 20 they’re no longer good enough or qualified enough to continue being a part of that player’s life,” Gaston said. “That can be different in each player’s infrastructure.”
He added: “We really encourage to not cut people out and not make people feel the way Happy Walters made us feel. Like we were less than and tried to really keep us under wraps. Really tried to diminish our role to the client.”
Like the rest of Gaston’s clients, Cavs forward Damyean Dotson’s roots with his agent run deep. (Photo: Jason Miller/Getty Images)So far, it’s working. Fox signed a five-year, $163 million max extension in November, a deal that could rise to a $196 million super-max if certain clauses are hit. Dotson signed a two-year, $4 million deal with the Cavaliers in free agency.
Each negotiation presented its own challenges. Fox has been a standout point guard since Sacramento took him fifth overall in 2017 and grown into the franchise’s foundational star, but he has not made an All-Star team or the playoffs in first three years – mile markers that could help drive up a young player’s asking price. The Kings also fired their general manager Divac midway through negotiations, taking away the point of contact Gaston had been dealing with for months.
Dotson hit free agency after three stop-and-start seasons with the Knicks, never quite solidifying himself in the rotation after getting picked in the second round. Gaston prepared for free agency by narrowing Dotson’s range to five to six teams after evaluating depth charts and coaches, then spent the next few days tethered to his phone weathering a fast-moving free agency period.
“Both of them were high pressure because I had to get De’Aaron Fox a max contract,” Gaston said. “It couldn’t be a dollar or a penny less. That was the expectation. Then, with Damyean, my goal was to get him above a minimum contract because I feel he’s worth more than that. I feel he’s a solid rotational player in the NBA. We wanted this contract to be the bridge to the next one, where we could (get) a multi-year, eight-figure contract.”
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While he hopes to grow Family First into a larger operation, Gaston said he has other goals in mind. While the NBA is a majority Black league, its player agents are majority White. So are front offices. Gaston wants to open doors to people underrepresented in the industry.
“One major purpose is giving minorities a chance,” he said. “In this business if you look a certain type of way or you wear your hair a certain type of way, if you dress a certain type of way, people are not going to give you a chance. That door is going to get slammed shut before you even get to the hallway. Obviously, people have to be qualified; you have to be responsible, you have to know what you’re doing. But I’m real big into giving minorities a chance. I’m also big into women empowerment as well. Those are things that are important to me.”
That weighed on Fox as well when he decided to go with Gaston.
“It’s kind of looking with someone who looks like you,” he said. “Kind of relates a little bit more. A lot of times that person will probably be inclined to learn about you more on a deeper personal level.”
The agency is still in its early stages, but a simple YouTube search reveals just how far Gaston has traveled to get here. Back in his training days, he would record his Houston Preps workouts and post them online. Fox came upon one with him a little while ago, his name attached to the headline, in awe of where their relationship began.
“We’ve come a long way,” Fox said. “But we’ve got a long way to go.”
Yet for however far he goes, Gaston hasn’t forgotten where he started. He still gets onto the court; that part of him, he says, will never fully be left behind. Training is a luxury these days, though. And when he does lean back into his old life, he’s got one new rule: Family First clients get dibs.
(Top photo courtesy of Chris Gaston)
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