For The Content: A Non-Stop Day with Trick Shot Expert Austin Mills

The story of Austin Mills has to start with basketball. He grew up playing hoops, practicing well past sunset, following his hometown Lakers, and dreaming big NBA dreams. Now, at 23, those dreams are starting to come true — though not quite in the way he first expected. Mills found a home hosting online videos for “the league” while also carving out his own niche as an Insta-famous trickshot artist.

It’s an interesting twist in a fascinating story, one that made Mills a perfect match for the versatility of DENIZEN® from Levi’s®. To learn a little bit more about his life, DENIZEN sent me to spend a day with him — to explore his whirlwind journey from high school hoops stardom to Instagram “influencer” status.

“The trick shot thing originally started in college when I was a senior at Baylor,” he says when we meet. “My senior year I wasn’t getting as much playing time as I hoped, so I started messing around in the gym and shooting trick shots. I started putting these little montages together on Instagram and they just blew up.”‘

It was a slam dunk for the dead-eye shooter. He already had the range, and the trick shot phenoms Dude Perfect had paved a path. His social media channels caught fire in a hurry. By the time Mills graduated, he wasn’t worried about getting a 9-5. Instead, he was ready to dive headfirst into the nebulous-but-highly-malleable life of an influencer — with all the surprises that entails.

“My schedule is flexible,” he says, “but it’s flexible based around how I want it to be flexible. Today, I’m shooting with a kid who has a million subscribers on YouTube. Tomorrow, it’s something different.”

This love of flexibility has become the rallying cry of a whole generation — a new era where employment is valued for how much freedom it offers. As an influencer, Mills is a poster boy for this 2017 economy. He’s comfortable bouncing from one gig to the next, chasing his own idea of what it means to be cool, modern, and fun, offering great value to his followers by creating approachable content along the way.

“The beauty of what I do is that my days are always very, very different,” he says. “That’s why everything feels fresh for me, is because I don’t have to wake up and do the same thing over and over again. Sometimes I’ll go to the gym in the morning. Sometimes I’ll go to the gym in the afternoon. Sometimes we’re shooting content at 8 in the morning, 3 in the afternoon or 12 at night. It’s always different. But for the most part it consists of me going to the gym, creating content, editing my content, and then setting up opportunities with brands and other influencers.”

With his crazy schedule, Mills has to be prepared for anything; his DENIZENs give him the flexibility to do just that.

In the years since Baylor, Mills — widely known for his wild trick shots, NBA collabs, and infectious smile — has quickly built a huge online following. Now, the former Baylor basketball player-turned-full-time-social-media-host hopes to expand his reach and grow into a household name. He’s done it through constantly feeding the social media beast with an array of trick shots, stunts, and vlogs (Austin’s YouTube video about the Fyre Fest catastrophe went viral across the internet).

In fact, this desire and effort to constantly create is the one thing that Mills doesn’t give himself the freedom to move off of his schedule.

“Every day, it’s FTC,” he says, flashing a smile. “It’s ‘for the content.’ Because there are times where you don’t want to do things, but you always have to remember FTC. You do it for the content. You do it for your fans so you push yourself to that next level to go out and actually create that content.”