Long before he was the NBA’s king of the “UTEP Two-Step,” Tim Hardaway was another kid dribbling around Chicago—and making a racket in the process. When day turned to night, when the bitter cold swept the Midwest in the fall and winter, when the courts were closed and he had nowhere else to play, young Tim would dribble in the basement of his family’s home. And when his parents sent him out to pick up the newspaper or milk or cigarettes, Tim would bounce the ball there and back, too, much to the chagrin of the neighborhood.

“People was, like, ‘What is he doing bouncing the ball at 7:00 a.m. in the morning or 6:30 in the morning?’” Tim recalls.

Dylan Kaufmann and Eric Braunstein faced many of those challenges—in terms of both weather and the limitations of living in a densely populated neighborhood—as kids in Long Island.

“I grew up with two sisters, my parents always yelling at me, so I had to figure out a way to dribble inside without making noise because I just wanted to get better,” Dylan says. “But living in New York comes with a lot of challenges. I can't go outside unless it's really warm outside, which is usually in the summer or late spring. Gym accessibility is not easy.”

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, though, Dylan and Eric could study the tricks of ball-handling greats like Tim on YouTube.

“When I was trying to make my varsity team, [Tim Sr.] was the guy I would emulate how to do a crossover the right way,” Eric says. “Not carrying the ball, [but] really trying to get by the defender the right way. Practicing Tim's moves really improves your game. So I was able to become captain of my team by practicing his moves.”

After teaming up at the Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway (HAFTR) in Long Island, Dylan and Eric went on to Queens College, where their friendship grew. In the years after their undergraduate studies, they started running basketball skills clinics for kids at local schools. For all that superstars like Stephen Curry, Kyrie Irving and James Harden had done to popularize crossover dribbles for the next generation, these kids lacked both dribbling fundamentals and the means to correct their apparent issues.

“It's not just because we had the problem,” Dylan says. “We see other people are struggling getting better, but outside of their house, like when they come to clinics, what are they going to do when they go home? They've got to practice, they've got to get better.”

In 2015, Dylan started thinking seriously about how he could solve this recurring conundrum. He began collecting materials and considering how he could create a product that would, at once, allow kids to dribble quietly indoors and improve their ball-handling fundamentals. He enlisted Eric to help with design.

By 2016, after carefully studying the shape of a proper dribbling stance, they’d come up with the idea of a foldable, T-shaped trampoline of sorts for quiet ball-handling. But they still had to determine what to make it out of. They tested a slew of sound-dampening materials, hoping to find something durable, foldable and on which a basketball would bounce appropriately. Toward the end of 2018, following months of research and development, they finally settled on an effective build for their indoor dribbling solution.

“You never dribble straight up and down. You dribble in a bent position with your knees and your shoulders parallel to each other,” Dylan explains. “So that's why the design is the way it is because your feet are spread out. You've got space to put it between your legs and your knees, and your shoulders are always parallel to each other.”

With a working version in hand, Dylan and Eric were just about ready to take their product, which they dubbed the Dream Silencer by Dream Dribble, to market. But first, they would need a spokesperson, someone whose endorsement would lend their creation the credibility it needed to become more than a personal project.