LAWRENCE, Kan. — In April, before the McDonald’s All-American game in Chicago, young fans gathered at the players’ hotel wanting to get a look at the future stars. Their attention was diverted when a 30-year-old Ukranian man walked through the lobby. Peter Danyliv was suddenly inundated with selfie requests.
“People were asking for his autograph. People were wanting to get photos with him,” says Brandon Walker, the former head of grassroots marketing for Adidas. “To see him be a public figure within that space, I thought was amazing.”
You may not have heard of Danyliv, but chances are your favorite college basketball player has. Danyliv has more than 1.6 million followers on his TikTok and Instagram accounts, where he posts instructional clips. He has also trained some of the top players in the Midwest, including former Iowa star Luka Garza and nearly the entire Kansas basketball team. He was at the McDonald’s game to watch two of the five-star incoming freshmen he had trained: Duke’s Mark Mitchell and KU’s Gradey Dick. Christian Braun, the 21st pick in the 2022 NBA Draft, credits Danyliv for his ascension last season as a junior for the national champion Jayhawks. “He saw more in my game than a lot of people saw,” Braun says.
How did a guy who played one year of junior-college basketball — and sparingly at that — go on to train NBA hopefuls and become a social media star? Danyliv might have grown up in Kyiv, but he is living out the quintessential American dream.
@peterdanylivLETS WORK??♬ original sound – Peter Danyliv
In 2004 the first volume of “NBA Street Series: Ankle Breakers” series hit shelves. Stephon Marbury serves as the narrator and first ankle-breaker. Then comes Allen Iverson, who had the best crossover in the league and the bravado to even put Michael Jordan on skates. It was those images of Iverson about nine minutes into the DVD that captured the imagination of a 12-year-old boy from Ukraine.
“That was it for me,” Danyliv says. “I fell in love. I fell in love so bad. I was like, I want to come to America.”
Danyliv was one of many in a generation of overseas players who fell in love with a game that had turned international. This was the streetball age of hoops, when the creativity on the pavement hit the NBA like never before. Danyliv didn’t have access to any games in realtime, but he became obsessed with the stars in those videos. Danyliv already loved basketball when he was introduced to Iverson. His grandpa, who played professionally in Italy, planted the seeds when he was 6 and would drop him off at a nearby college practice. Eventually, little Danyliv was playing with the much-older players. But that first edition of “Ankle Breakers” took his passion for the game to another level. He’d spend hours trying to mimic Iverson, perfecting his right-to-left crossover.
Danyliv was a good player himself. At 11, he joined the youth club for BC Kyiv, a now-defunct franchise that was one of the best in Ukraine at the time. At 13, he played point guard for Ukraine’s Under-15 junior national team. Then in 2007, a former Minnesota Timberwolves scout named Boris Karebin came to Kyiv to scout some of the city’s best players and offer the chance to help them get to America. Karebin told Danyliv he could get him a scholarship to a prep school in Florida for a fee of $500. All he needed was the money, plus a plane ticket.
Danyliv’s father, who was on board with the move, got him his ticket, and he arrived in Miami in the fall of 2007. His team at Westlake Prep was stacked with talent, a mix of international and American players that had been recruited by Rumeal Robinson, who starred on Michigan’s 1989 national championship team. Danyliv’s notable teammates included former UConn center Amida Brimah and current Washington Commanders tight end Sammis Reyes. It was one of those pop-up schools that was intended to build an all-star basketball team. Danyliv called the education he received “bogus.”
“I went from being a straight-D student in Ukraine to a straight-A-plus student in America,” he says.
Robinson helped acclimate him to America and would often take him for dinner or to games in Miami. But months after he arrived, Danyliv quit hearing from Robinson. He eventually found out that Robinson, who had a checkered past, had gone to federal prison and would serve 6 1/2 years on 11 charges that included bank fraud. But Danyliv’s housing, food and tuition were paid for, as promised, and the basketball was legit. Westlake Prep played nationally-ranked teams and Danyliv had the opportunity to play against the competition he desired.
He was being recruited during his junior year by several mid-major programs nearby, including Arkansas State, Georgia State, Florida International, Florida Gulf Coast and Florida Atlantic. Then on the morning after the first game of his senior season, he woke up and struggled to extend his legs. An MRI revealed that he’d torn cartilage in both of his knees. He missed his entire senior season, and the schools he’d been hearing from went quiet. He had microfracture surgery on both knees and tried to find a college that would take him. He emailed his highlights to a number of schools and finally found one that would give him a scholarship in Murray State College, a juco in Tishomingo, Okla. Unfortunately, his knees didn’t get any better.
“I couldn’t move at all,” Danyliv says. “It felt like after the surgery, because my quads got weaker, my legs like atrophied a little bit. It felt like my knee started hurting worse, because there was like nothing to compensate for that. So my knees were taking even more beating than they were before.”
Danyliv found out that he had degenerative cartilage in his knees. It’s the same condition that ended the careers of Greg Oden and Brandon Roy. His basketball career was finished. “I was pretty down on myself,” he says. “I just didn’t know what the next step was going to be.”
At first, he emailed coaches about trying to continue to play. Then he found an opportunity at Ottawa University, a small Baptist school in Kansas, which had an opening for a student assistant coach and offered a partial scholarship. It was good to still be around basketball, but his role as a student assistant was limited.
“As a student assistant coach, you have no say,” Danyliv says. “I wanted to be useful.”
In his second year in the program, he figured out how. He offered to train the Ottawa players on the side, and four players started attending his skill training sessions. He says he had no clue what he was doing, but he tried to come up with some drills that would hold their interest. “As long as we were working hard, that’s all that mattered,” he says.
Danyliv set up a camera on a tripod and recorded every workout. He would edit the footage, and at one point, he put some of those workout highlights on YouTube. “ It was disgusting,” he says, laughing. “I think I took them down because I was so ashamed. It’s the most laughable thing ever.”
Yet what Danyliv was doing got noticed, and he was approached by the university’s chaplain about training his 10-year-old son for $10 an hour. “I’m a broke college kid from Ukraine,” Danyliv says. “I was like, dude, yes, I will train him.”
Soon, another family asked to train their son and daughter, and it kept growing from there. Eventually, the school told Danyliv that he had to find another gym to train his clients. The local methodist church offered for him to use its gym. The goals had small metal backboards, the rims were crooked and the floor had dead spots … but it was private and most importantly, it was free.
Still a full-time college student, he was training 40-plus players, up to local high-schoolers, and had raised his prices to $25 an hour. “For a college kid, I was making bank,” he says. “Like, go to McDonald’s every day.”
Danyliv started to realize his basketball training could become a career. He caught what he calls his big break in 2016 when he found out some of the local players he trained were friends with Zach Harvey, who at that time was a top-25 recruit in his class and had a scholarship offer from Kansas. He wanted to get Harvey in his gym; one night Harvey’s buddies brought him to Ottawa for a training session.
“Zach Harvey had such a big name on a high school and AAU scene,” Danyliv says. “Ever since I got him in and posted him on my Instagram, it kind of started like snowballing from there.”
Soon, he had Harvey’s KC Run GMC teammates training with him, too. Danyliv became obsessed with becoming a better trainer, pouring into studying video. He found a channel on YouTube called MLG Highlights that would post every made basket from every NBA game each night. He’d watch every one and build folders with different moves and concepts that he could teach.
“Once you start like showing kids actual proof, then they buy in a little bit more,” he says.
Peter Danyliv looks on as former Richmond star Jacob Gilyard works out in his gym. (Courtesy Emma Pravecek)
Danyliv also upgraded his digs, using his own money and funds he raised to renovate the church gym. New wall mounts, new backboard and a new floor. In exchange, the church promised him he could stay another two years rent-free. When the two years ended, the church decided he needed to find a new home. He struggled to find a good spot and settled on renting court time at Rock Chalk Park in Lawrence. He lost some of his Ottawa clients but picked up some new ones from Topeka. But the new setup was awful. It wasn’t private. There were distractions everywhere. And with the facility closing at 9 p.m., the young staff would often try to kick him and his players out early. One night they even tried to call the police. That same day, the net he used to carry in balls and equipment ripped, and basketballs went flying all over the parking lot.
“That was just cherry on top,” he says. “I was getting ready to quit and go find a coaching job. I was so done with training. I remember thinking, this is Jesus talking to me saying that you’re done.”
That night he went on hoopdirt.com and started looking for coaching jobs. But then a friend of a friend heard about his frustration and told him his church had a gym he didn’t think anyone was using. It was at the corner of Iowa Street and Bob Billings Parkway in Lawrence, a spot Danyliv regularly passed but never realized housed a gym. The next day he set up a tour.
“I was imagining a carpet floor and like fan-shaped backboards and like a tiny bitty space that you can’t train out of,” he says. “I walk in here and my jaw drops. It’s beautiful.”
Danyliv, sitting in a conference room just above his gym, looks down at the court with pride. He signed a contract and was given the keys and told the gym was his whenever he wanted. He also has a kitchen and lounge area, a meeting room and a large storage closet.
Life was great until another challenge came along: the pandemic. Danyliv wasn’t allowed to have anyone in his gym, so he started training outdoors in Ottawa and also conducting sessions on Zoom. “It felt so freakin’ weird, seeing kids through camera doing the move,” he says. “Some kids didn’t even have a hoop. I had to improvise. What can we do without a hoop?”
But every challenge in Danyliv’s world has always led to an opportunity.
A few years ago Danyliv reached out to Walker, the former Adidas rep who now works for Meta. Adidas was trying to work with influencers in all sports, and in basketball, Walker discovered that trainers were the perfect target. “That was the content that the players were consuming on a day-to-day basis,” he says.
Walker had followed Danyliv on social media for years, but he was blunt in why he had no interest in working with him. He had no idea what Danyliv looked like.
“When you walk in the gym,” Walker told him, “I need all of these young basketball players to know exactly who you are — not just your handle, but your face.”
Danyliv had seen other trainers post video of themselves, but that always struck him as the wrong mindset. Everything should be about the players, he thought. But Walker opened his eyes to the fact that he needed his own brand.
And while he couldn’t bring anyone else in his gym during the pandemic, he was still allowed to be there. So he set up a camera and started making videos. He had recently started a TikTok account, and his early posts of his players had generated little traffic. He posted multiple times a day, and his first video to really get traction was a tour of his gym, which has over 604.4 thousand likes. His follower count started to grow, and he started to figure out what clicked. Eventually, he hit 10,000 followers, which allowed him to monetize his account. At first, he was making pennies. Then he was pulling in an extra $100-200 a month. Then his follower count kept growing and growing … It’s now up to 1.3 million.
His videos are quick. Often he’ll pick a type of move, like a hesitation dribble, for instance, and then show the four best moves to use.
“I use catchy words, catchy phrases that every kid loves to hear, like how to destroy defender’s ankles,” he says. “Or like, how you put defense on skates? Or how to bully defenders, fry defenders, how to cook defenders. Just use all these phrases that all my little kids are saying. It went like freaking wildfire.”
One reason his videos resonate: Danyliv is skilled. His jumper is pure. His handle is tight. He can’t play in live games anymore because of his knees, but these kids want to be able to shoot and handle the ball like he can.
“He, to date, has become one of the best digital creators in the basketball space that actually has tangible value for the young basketball player who’s trying to improve his game,” Walker says. “It’s quick, it’s easy. There’s music. There’s text overlay. It’s fun. It feels approachable. If I’m a kid and I can go on his Instagram and learn five to six drills and only spend two or three minutes on it, that’s the key. That’s the dream. And he’s been able to build that.”
A big part of his income comes from social media, mostly from TikTok. Instagram isn’t as lucrative, but he makes money there too — from both the site and paid campaigns. His gym is also like a hooper’s dream house. He’s got every type of basketball that gets used in the college game, plus NBA and FIBA balls. He has two shooting machines, six rapid reboot units, foam rollers, massage guns, infinite cases of Body Armour (he gets a nice shipment every month) and nearly every type of recovery equipment you can imagine. All provided for free.
@peterdanyliv WE GOT EVERYTHING #fyp #fy #foryoupage #foryou #leapday #dayattheoffice #featureme ♬ original sound – Peter Danyliv
He’s sponsored by 15 different companies, including Adidas, Body Armour, Eastbay (clothing line), Dr. Dish (shooting guns), Rapid Reboot (compression therapy boots) and a local car dealership. The same dealership that provides cars for Kansas players through NIL deals has also hooked up Danyliv with a 2022 Toyota Avalon just for hanging a sign that appears in his videos.
Danyliv employs a second trainer and his business partner Ashley Beets handles the administrative work, setting up workout times and interacting with parents. He also has interns, whose primary responsibility is playing defense on the players he trains and shooting video. He can simply focus on teaching the game and creating content.
“It’s crazy,” he says. “Looking at this gym and all this stuff that we have. I remember at my junior college we’d never had a shooting gun. At Ottawa, we had one shooting gun that was always broken. Never worked. So it was pretty much we never had one. And now having two brand new shooting guns on a deal that I get paid for to use. I can’t believe it.”
There is one sad side to this story. Danyliv’s country is at war. He hasn’t been back to Ukraine since April 2020. His mom, dad and younger sister are still in Ukraine. His mom has always worked as a florist, and flowers aren’t a priority during war. He is able to send her and his sister money to help them get by.
“Not having my family being able to see what I’ve built sucks,” he says. “I would love for them to come one day to see what I’ve built and watch a workout. They haven’t been able to watch one of my high school games in person. Nothing, really. Everything has been a screen. They’re all going through a lot. I definitely want to be with them.”
He wonders what is next for him. This summer he trained 53 players who are either currently playing Division I basketball or playing professionally. He’d love to train NBA players and has had some reach out, but the interest wanes when they find out he’s in Lawrence. Most want to spend their offseasons on the coasts. He’s considered a move, but he loves his gym. Loves his setup.
The social media fame is cool and obviously allows him to live comfortably, but his real pride is his training. He believes in the work he’s done, learning from trial and error and video. He still obsesses over film, spending hours watching games from all over the world on Synergy.
“I used to try to help the player, but in a wrong way,” he says. “I wanted to please a player when they would come to me. So I wanted to teach a player like a bunch of isolation moves, bunch of combos, so a player can leave my gym feeling good. I was never training players for coaches … once I realized that I have to train players for the coach, that’s when I felt like I started seeing growth with my players.”
Braun says that Danyliv is the hardest worker he’s ever been around.
“He really sits down and watches film with us,” Braun says. “He studies your game, studies what you do, studies actions that you’re in with your team, and it’s specific to every player. Then just being in his gym and being around makes you want to be in the gym more.”
The proof is in the production. Braun went from averaging 9.7 points as a sophomore to 14.1 as a junior. He went from a spot-up shooter to one of the best slashers in the Big 12. He made more shots inside the arc in 11 games than he had during his first two years at Kansas. Danyliv helped Jalen Wilson get his confidence back after a slow start last year, and both starters on the national title team were regulars in his gym.
“We had the pieces, but me and Jalen together, especially, we kind of locked ourselves in Peter’s gym,” Braun says. “He put his hands on nearly everyone that was on our roster. He’s a big part of a lot of our individual growth, because practice is a lot of team things, especially with Coach (Bill) Self. We work on a lot on defense and not as much individual skill. So having a gym that close and having a guy like Peter is very, very helpful. There’s no question that he made us better and had a role in our championship.”
Danyliv’s favorite videos are the ones he’s made to show how what those players did in his gym translated to the game. He set out on this journey just wanting to feel useful, and 10 years later, his work helped build a championship team.
(Top photo of Peter Danyliv with Luka Garza: Courtesy Emma Pravecek)
