The Rise Of The Athlete Investing Collective

Devin Booker with Coco5 Beverage

Courtesy of Company

Athletes have long used their star power to supercharge consumer brands. Shaquille O’Neal, for example, has parlayed the fame and wealth generated by his basketball career into a sprawling business empire, endorsing brands including Papa John’s, Pepsi, IcyHot, The General and Carnival Cruise Line, among others. The individual athlete-angel investor has also become increasingly common, as evidenced by Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James and Rory McIlroy among the investors participating in WHOOP’s recent $575 million financing.

Now, a new model of collective investment is beginning to emerge. Rather than investing individually or receiving a small equity kicker alongside an endorsement contract, athletes are pooling their capital through professionally managed investment vehicles designed to secure meaningful ownership positions in consumer businesses. Their ability to generate attention and broader market awareness remains valuable, but it follows the investment rather than substituting for it. The endorsement opportunity becomes the icing on the cake; the underlying objective is ownership, long-term value creation and real financial exposure to the company’s success—or failure.

In April 2026, consumer-focused private equity firm L Catterton teamed up with investment advisory firm Patricof to announce CHAMP—short for Champion Athlete Managing Partner—a special-purpose investment fund that offers professional athletes the opportunity to invest alongside the firms as direct owners of portfolio companies. CHAMP is raising $500 million and leveraging a network of more than 250 elite athletes, including Kevin Durant, Tyrese Haliburton, Sophie Cunningham, Joe Burrow and Mike Trout, to write meaningful checks into businesses while also helping those companies reach consumers and build broader market awareness.

CHAMP’s first transaction was a nearly $50 million minority investment in Rhoback, an activewear company founded in 2016 and known for its moisture-wicking performance polos, quarter-zips and hoodies. For the athletes involved, the investment case extended beyond the product or the opportunity to promote it. NFL quarterback Jameis Winston described visiting Rhoback’s founders at their Charlottesville campus and seeing the wooden truck from which the company operated during its early days.

“Anytime that you’re analyzing investments, you always look at the people,” Winston said. “You hear a lot of athlete stories about starting from the bottom and having to go through those dark days to eventually become successful. To get a chance to see their story and be able to support people that are so genuine and hardworking as the three founders—Kevin, Matt and Kristina—was very impactful for me as an athlete investor.”

While CHAMP is formalizing the athlete investing collective through a $500 million fund, Jim Reynolds, founder of Chicago-based Loop Capital—the largest Black-owned investment bank in the country—has been piloting a similar model since 2021. His athlete syndicate started with an investment in Coco5, a fast-growing coconut-water brand born inside the Chicago Blackhawks’ training room.

The Investment Banker Behind Coco5

Reynolds founded Loop Capital in 1997 after 16 years working on Wall Street. The firm started as an investment bank, advising corporations, municipalities and institutional clients on raising capital and executing financial transactions, subsequently expanding into institutional asset management, and now has approximately $10 billion in assets under management, and a separate wealth-management group that gives high-net-worth clients, including athletes and entertainers, access to private investments.

The wealth-management business is personal for Reynolds. His son, Miles, grew up playing basketball and his circle included elite athletes such as Devin Booker, D’Angelo Russell and Derrick Rose. Those relationships gave Reynolds an early view into the financial challenges confronting professional athletes, who can earn extraordinary amounts of money during relatively short careers and often struggle to preserve that wealth over the remainder of their lives.

“Athletes have this very unique situation where they make most of their money when they’re least equipped to deal with it,” Reynolds explained to me. While most business executives gradually reach their peak earning years in their forties and fifties, professional athletes experience the inverse trajectory, often receiving life-changing contracts in their early twenties before retiring in their thirties with another 50 or 60 years of life to finance. Reynolds’ thesis is that preserving that capital requires moving athletes beyond traditional wealth-management portfolios and into ownership of operating businesses and long-duration assets that can continue producing value after the endorsement checks and playing contracts stop.

Coco5 became one of the earliest testing grounds for that strategy.

A Hydration Fix from the Blackhawks’ Training Room

The story behind Coco5 begins in part with concerns about the dyes and other artificial ingredients contained in leading sports beverages. According to cofounder Scott Sandler, during the Blackhawks’ 2009–2010 season, Mike Gapski, then the team’s head athletic trainer, was concerned that ingredients in conventional sports drinks were complicating the management of players’ various medical prescriptions and supplements; the roster included several players with ADHD, for instance.

The Blackhawks’ staff worked with Sandler to develop a “better-for-you” formula based around coconut water and its naturally occurring electrolytes. The resulting product contains 26% coconut water and fruit-forward flavors designed to make coconut water more palatable to consumers who want its nutritional profile without its distinctive taste, according to Sandler.

Forming An Athlete Investment Syndicate

Reynolds encountered Coco5 in 2011 when one of his bankers brought the company to his attention. A self-described health nut, he boasts, “I’m 71—and I’ve probably been the same weight, same size, same fat content for the last 40 years…I’m very conscious of what I eat, drink and do.”

Already familiar the benefits of coconut water, after talking to the team, he invested immediately. “I invested sight unseen, without due diligence, without anything, which is not what I normally do…but the product was that good.”

Reynolds joined the board but initially remained a passive investor until 2021, when Sandler approached him for the capital required to grow the business. By then, Reynolds had spent years introducing Coco5 to young basketball players in his son’s orbit. They were consumers before they became investors.

In connection with the 2021 financing, Reynolds assembled an athlete-led group that included Booker, Russell, Rose, Charles Barkley and twins Marcus and Markieff Morris, with Reynolds and Booker taking the largest ownership positions.

“The qualification was, everybody had to put their own money up,” Reynolds said. “And they had to believe in the product. They had to drink it.”

Coco5’s Growth and National Expansion

With the ownership group in place, Coco5 shifted from a relatively small beverage business into a national expansion phase. Since 2021, the brand has grown from approximately 100 retail locations to thousands of stores, securing distribution through Sprouts, Whole Foods, Walmart, Stop & Shop and Costco, while also expanding beyond the traditional grocery aisle into hotels, major U.S. airports and even hospitals and senior living facilities.¹

Reynolds explained that the company’s interest in healthcare channels grew in part from unsolicited messages it received from customers who were caring for aging parents, who had to be hospitalized regularly for dehydration before introducing Coco5 into their daily routine. Older adults are particularly susceptible to dehydration because age-related changes can diminish the sensation of thirst, while chronic health conditions and certain medications can further increase the risk. A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis covering more than 22,000 adults age 65 and older estimated that nearly 25% non-hospitalized older adults was dehydrated because of insufficient fluid intake.

In January 2026, the company accelerated its growth strategy by bringing in an additional $10 million in capital to strengthen the management team, increase production and support product innovation and international expansion. Coco5 recruited Marc Doggett to join as chief executive officer after nearly two decades working in sports nutrition and functional beverages, including at Liquid I.V. Doggett told me the company expects to grow from approximately $10 million in revenue to a $30 million run rate by the end of 2026 and projects that it could surpass $100 million by mid-2027.

But even with that momentum, Coco5 faces an uphill battle in a category dominated by established brands such as Vita Coco and Harmless Harvest and increasingly crowded by newer entrants including 100 Coconuts and Once Upon a Coconut, all competing for limited shelf space and consumer loyalty.

Does Athlete Co-Ownership Drive Differentiated Value?

A lingering question is whether athlete co-ownership creates value beyond what a strong endorsement agreement could deliver.

Coco5’s athlete owners have already demonstrated how their involvement can extend beyond a conventional advertising campaign. During the 2023 NBA playoffs, Russell repeatedly brought a bottle of Coco5 to Lakers postgame press conferences, creating a viral moment when team staff removed it because the beverage was not an official NBA partner. And Barkley also used a nationally televised postgame interview to encourage Booker to hydrate with Coco5, joking that he should be careful not to have the bottle taken away.

Beyond the repeated and layered market exposure generated by its various co-owners, the deeper distinction from a typical endorsement is that ownership gives each athlete an ongoing incentive to support the company long after any individual endorsement campaign ends. Reynolds said the athletes are expected to support Coco5 when the business needs them, whether through retail demonstrations, television appearances or market activations.

“They’re there because they own this, and they drive it,” he said.

ATHLOS Adapts Athlete Ownership for Women’s Track

The Coco5 experience illustrates the potential advantage of converting athletes from paid promoters into owners with an ongoing incentive to support the business. That same alignment principle is now being applied beyond consumer brands and inside the sports properties athletes themselves help make valuable.

Alexis Ohanian, Reddit cofounder and General Partner of billion-dollar VC firm Seven Seven Six, launched ATHLOS in 2024 as a women-only track and field league designed to pair elite competition with the entertainment and production value typically reserved for larger professional sports. In 2026, ATHLOS expanded into a two-city league spanning London and New York, with more than $2.1 million in prize money and Olympic and world champions Sha’Carri Richardson, Gabby Thomas and Tara Davis-Woodhall serving as athlete owners and advisors. Eligible participating athletes also have the opportunity to receive equity in the league, allowing them to share in the long-term value of the business their performances are helping to build.

The model is particularly significant in track and field, a sport in which athletes are chronically under-compensated relative to the value they create, with women facing an even sharper imbalance despite driving many of the sport’s most visible moments and commercially valuable storylines. ATHLOS is attempting to change that economic relationship by treating athletes not simply as talent hired for an event, but as stakeholders in the underlying enterprise. The structure resembles a startup granting ownership to the founders whose labor and continued involvement—their sweat equity—are essential to building the product.

In this manner, ATHLOS differs from CHAMP and Reynolds’ Coco5 syndicate; yet, the governing principle is the same. Athletes will be more valuable and more invested in the long-term success of a business when they have skin in the game and can participate in the upside rather than being paid only for a single appearance, competition or advertising campaign.

The Collective Advantage

The most attractive private investments are notoriously difficult for individual angels — athletes or otherwise — to access, often requiring institutional relationships, specialized diligence and enough capital to compete for limited allocations. CHAMP, Coco5 and ATHLOS represent different versions of the same emerging model: athletes organizing collectively to gain access to more compelling investment opportunities. Whether these examples develop into a broader investment playbook remains to be seen, but they suggest that the next phase of athlete-brand relationships may be defined less by whose name appears in the advertisement and more by who is meaningfully represented on the cap table.