Mike Hill kneels at the bed of his son, Jaeden Udean, and peeks under the striped sheets. A shaky stack of shoe boxes scales one of the bedroom’s walls, high enough to cast a shadow. Hill’s head is nowhere to be seen, but the shoes are. He flings them out from under the bed, and they thud across the room. Black high-tops and low-tops with pink laces. Nikes and Adidases.

“He’s got all kinds of shoes,” said Hill, with a grunt. Another Nike shoots out.

Udean, a standout basketball player at DeLaSalle High School in Minneapolis, said he keeps other shoes at his friends’ houses. His high school gave him two lockers, he said — one for his jerseys, another for the shoes.

Space can seem like the only limitation for high school hoopers like Udean, whose shoe collection stretches into the dozens of pairs and probably deep into the thousands of dollars. And the shoes seem to just appear, either from brands trying to get products in front of their social media followers, or from coaches as a reward for winning.

Historically, shoe companies have leaned on superstars to sell shoes but are now using high school athletes to be brand ambassadors as the sneakerhead economy descends from a larger marketing shift in amateur sports.

For shoe companies, giving out free kicks can tap into a kid’s local influence. And for the players who are good enough, the shoe game gives them another arena in which to compete, if an unspoken one.

Fans sitting in high school stands from Minneapolis to Rochester may not notice, but the players do. With the 2025-26 boys high school basketball season underway, players admit their eyes are bound to drift from the scoreboard to the floor, just to see if their shoe game got beat. They’re also a bit apprehensive about disclosing where, and who, they got their shoes from.

“If you know, you know,” Udean, a junior guard said, holding back a smile.

Throwing a ‘little carrot’

To get the best kicks, you have to be in the know. And Udean knows that perhaps the best shoe spot in Minneapolis is a nondescript garage door. It belongs to Jeremy Miller, who runs D1 Minnesota, an elite travel basketball program. And behind the door are shelves brimming with Adidas shoes. Only Adidas.

“My family of four will never be seen in public anywhere wearing anything but Adidas,” he said.

Miller’s team plays in an Adidas’ sponsored travel league. And in return, the brand arms Miller with a yearly allowance of shoes. Every April, a FedEx truck rolls toward the Miller garage with some 70 boxes in tow, he said, causing his wife to often roll her eyes in response.

About a year and a half ago, Udean went to Miller with a request, and Miller responded with a bet. The youngster wanted an unreleased pair of Anthony Edwards signature shoes, stained with a swirl of blue and pink that’s reminiscent of cotton candy. Miller said if Udean won an upcoming tournament, they were his.

“If we could throw a little carrot to get a little extra effort out there, I’ll do it from time to time,” Miller said.

A win came after four overtimes. And the shoes did, too, after a trip to Miller’s garage.

“Real tiring game. Fast paced,” Udean recounted, glancing at the shoes now sitting near his family’s fireplace. “I don’t think I came out that game, either.”

You’ve got to earn shoes like that, Miller said. And the best way to do it is making his top 17U team. Each player who makes it gets an unreleased pair of shoes from Adidas like those pink-and-blue Anthony Edwards sneakers.

Those exclusive shoes are barely a drop in the global sneaker market. Nike brought in more than $7 billion during fiscal year 2025 from its Jordan brand alone. And Nike pumped another $400 million into its already $4 billion advertising budget, spending it primarily on endorsement contracts, sports events and free products.

Miller said Adidas has turned his team, and some 30 others like it around the country, into a vehicle for both marketing and market research. For Miller’s money, it seems like a good investment to send those two dozen coaches a batch of exclusive shoes and let them trickle out of garage doors. And, of course, let everyone take notice when players take them to school.

This unique method of sneaker acquisition is predominantly used by boys basketball players. Standout girls basketball players contacted by the Star Tribune said they are less involved, if at all.

If you play better, the brands will send more. And when Miller’s team made it to the league’s championship game, there was another pair — an all-black Damian Lillards — waiting in the locker room. The kids will run around, he said. They’ll rip through boxes. They’ll smile.

“When they get a new pair of shoes, it’s like Christmas and Easter all rolled into one,” Miller said.

Christmas comes five times a year for Jayden Moore, the star point guard for Hopkins High School, as it does for all the kids who compete in the Elite Youth Basketball League, Nike’s counterpart to the Adidas circuit. There are four sessions each summer before a national tournament in Georgia, and each comes with its own new set of gear. Moore spent the summer ripping boxes in his coach’s hotel rooms, finding shoes from the Sabrina Ionescu or Ja Morant lines that won’t be publicly available for months, if at all.

But, in the winter, Moore’s shoes stand out more when he wears them in Minnesota for the high school season.

“This year I’ll be having some shoes that nobody in Minnesota will have because I was pretty much the only kid to play on the EYBL circuit,” Moore said.

The sneakerhead economy lets players, from Minnesota and nationwide, wear their success. And that shapes the high school shoe game into a pyramid, Miller said. No matter who you are, there’s always a more elite level and more exclusive shoes to covet.

Moore said he tasted a new level this year, playing alongside kids who’ve already signed brand deals with Nike and received shoes directly from the Oregon-based company. He figured he’d ask Nike for some Space Jam 11s, if he had a deal like that.

“One day, I definitely will be getting them from the brands,” Moore said. “That’s the goal.”

Timmy Thomas, a freshman guard at Maranatha Christian Academy in Brooklyn Park, would be thrilled with a pair of EYBL shoes. If he ever sees Moore wearing them during the high school season, he knows what he’ll say.

“I’d be like ‘nice shoes,’ ” Thomas said. “Then, ‘how can I get them?’ ”

‘Bless the kids’

Moore estimates that he amassed some 200 pairs of sneakers, between the freebies and his “shoe plug” (his grandfather that’s known to drop off a pair of Jordans from time to time). At this point, even wading through his closet takes effort. He picks his shoes out the night before playing. Choosing them on gameday, he said, might drain his mental energy.

Since his freshman year, kids have come up to Moore, asking him for game-used pairs of shoes, he said. He’s happy to take them off, slap a signature on them and lighten his closet a bit. Ranked by ESPN as the 95th-best player in the country, he’ll play collegiately for the University of North Dakota next year.

“They just all swarmed me right, coming to the locker after the game,” Moore said. “So I just wanted to bless the kids with some shoes.”

Basketball players have a certain sway over their schools, said Miller, who also directs counseling services for Minneapolis Public Schools.

That influence is akin to the gravity of a popular kids table, according to Miller. It’s world-defining for a specific school and meaningless to everyone else. Shoes give brands a way to tap into it.

Adidas’ founder started with Olympic legend Jesse Owens, and the German-based company continues to do so with Edwards, the Minnesota Timberwolves’ young all-star. Nike hit the jackpot with Michael Jordan. But brands have started to look smaller, said Bill Carter, who teaches a course on amateur sports sponsorship at the University of Vermont and Boston College. Increasingly, they’ve tried to get their shoes on players with niche but significant influence, Carter said.

“It makes the whole thing believable,” Carter said of product deals with local influencers. “In the world we now live in, that’s more than an acceptable form of marketing. It’s a highly, highly successful part.”

It mirrors a larger shift in marketing, as companies move away from celebrity endorsements and toward the influencer economy. That’s opened branding opportunities for unexpected people in the sports world, such as sorority girls in Tuscaloosa, Ala.

Thomas, the Maranatha freshman, hasn’t yet played on those elite circuits where he could take home an exclusive shoe. But a pair of blue sneakers are unmistakable on his shelf. Just under the tongue, they bear “EYBL” in bold lettering. Thomas said he and his brother came across them on an online reseller and couldn’t pass on a chance to snatch them.

The churn factor

For Thomas, his own influence is easy to measure. Almost 21,000 people follow him on Instagram. More than 100,000 accounts follow his TikTok. When he posed behind a stack of sneakers for a TikTok in June, 800,000 people watched him do it.

That makes it easy for brands to see it, too. Five pairs of sneakers show up on their porch every month from brands hoping to sneak their shoes into a video, estimated Thomas’ mother, Kinna. Thomas puts the ones he likes behind plexiglass in a quintuple-decker shelf. The rest end up stacked in the corner of the basement.

When shoes come that quick, getting rid of them can take as much thought as getting them. Kinna Thomas said their basement stack as grown all summer, and Thomas will give them out to younger kids for the holidays. And Thomas is still growing, too. He had to banish five of his favorite pairs to a permanent place behind the plexiglass because he outgrew them, he said.

Some shoes earn a retirement, said Marcus Marshall Jr., a junior at Maranatha. He’ll never wear his blue Anthony Edwards low-tops again, after he scored his 1,000th high school point in them. Marshall tries to schedule his shoes for those type of achievements, because, that way, they’ll forever be imbued with the memory. He’s already pondering what shoes he’ll wear if Maranatha makes a run for the state championship next March.

Competing in the high school shoe game takes these type of calculations. The goal is to wear something unique. But not too unique.

You wouldn’t want to waste an exclusive pair on a game against a bad team, Moore said. And don’t wear something you can’t back up on the court: flashy shoes and no game is a recipe for ridicule, Thomas said.

But the cardinal rule of the high school shoe game is always wear sneakers nobody else has. Moore said he’ll never wear the same shoe twice this basketball season, always staying ahead of the competition. During some games, Udean switches his shoes each half. Marshall said he does the same.

“I kind of go for getting unique shoes so people can ask me, where did I get them from,” Marshall said. “Honestly, to start a trend.”

Between the growing feet and drive for exclusivity, not all shoes see the light of day. For his debut high school season, Thomas got his hands on a pair of purple Kobe Bryant low-tops with a neon Nike swoosh. They resale for $1,500, though with some sleuthing, Thomas got them for less than half of that.

In his basement gym, across from his growing stack of freebies, Thomas poses with his shoes worth as much as a paycheck. He’s certain nobody has anything like them. But if they do, Thomas says he’s ready to abandon the shoes. He’s sure he can find something else.

Upstairs, Kinna Thomas balances a stack of shoe boxes in her arms. “Bless our hearts!” she exclaimed, as she carried the teetering tower toward the basement.

By the time she returned, two more boxes were sitting on the front porch.