Kage McCorkle, founder of Hoop Editz, has been filming basketball highlight videos since he was in middle school.
Submitted photo
Six years ago, Kage McCorkle started making videos just to impress his older brothers and their friends.
The recent Franklin graduate has not only impressed thousands of others since then, but he’s also carved out a nice little cottage industry for himself.
Hoop Editz, which McCorkle formed in the summer of 2017 with the primary aim of making highlight films for aspiring college basketball players, is a blossoming media empire that has expanded beyond the hardwood — and is just getting started.
At first, McCorkle was just shooting home movies with his friends and his brothers, former Greenwood Christian basketball standouts Champ and Styles; soon afterward, the first Hoop Editz seed was planted.
“My dad asked me if I would make a video for Champ and his AAU team, which had a lot of the GCA team on it at the time,” Kage recalled. “It was his sophomore year, and Styles was on the team too. I was always, being the little brother, always seeking their approval — and especially their friends, for them to think I’m cool and everything. So I made a video, and they all loved it.”
McCorkle continued filming AAU games all summer, and he started selling highlight videos to the players on his brothers’ team. His initial asking price was $8 apiece.
“I just thought, if I could make like $50 a weekend,” he said, “I could sell to five players or six players and make around $50 a weekend, then I’d be set and happy.”
In July of 2017, McCorkle set up an Instagram page; two months later, he designed a Hoop Editz logo that is still in use. By summer’s end, players from other AAU teams were requesting that he shoot footage of their games as well. McCorkle’s services were in high enough demand by the following summer that he would go to tournaments and film as much of every game as he could, passing out business cards afterward.
He even hired his first employee — though that move was as much out of necessity as it was a desire to grow.
”I was 13, so I couldn’t drive anywhere,” McCorkle said, “so I would have one of Champ’s friends go with me and film.”
McCorkle had been filming everything on his phone when Hoop Editz was in its infancy, but by 2019, he was a bit more established and felt the need to upgrade. He bought his first camera with the aim of putting together a documentary series, “Road to State,” on the GCA boys basketball team.
He still continued to play basketball himself, suiting up for the Cougars’ JV team, but Kage had already made a decision about what his top priority was.
“I had the opportunity to dress for sectionals and decided — I stuck to this,” he said. “This is really what I love, and I’m just going to do this for sectionals, and that’s the year that GCA was ranked No. 1. There was a lot of hype behind the videos.”
Alas, the “Road to State” series never reached its completion; though the Cougars did win the Johnson County tournament and a Class A sectional championship, the onset of the COVID pandemic forced the cancellation of the remainder of the 2019-20 state tourney. McCorkle says he may end up finishing the documentary off one day by adding where-are-they-now footage of his brothers (both now playing basketball at Wabash College) and some of their former GCA teammates.
McCorkle’s financial bread and butter remains summer basketball — he shoots at Prep Hoops Circuit tournaments nearly every weekend — and he’s got a heavy enough workload that he currently has three employees: Heritage Christian grad Sam Graves and current Franklin students Jacob Meinczinger and Quentin Richards. McCorkle owns enough camera bodies (three Canon 90Ds and a Canon R) and lenses for all of them to work at the same time.
“I’m very lucky to have them,” McCorkle said.
Hoop Editz started branching out into other sports last year, shooting some club volleyball tournaments in the summer and Franklin football games in the fall. This spring, McCorkle took on what might be his most ambitious project to date — a documentary series on Grizzly Cub baseball star Max Clark.
Prep Baseball Report had reached out to McCorkle about doing such a series, but he opted to do it independently instead.
“I just decided I’d rather take the big risk and do it myself,” he said. “I’ll be able to have that content forever, own the rights to it and make money off of it that way.”
“The Max Clark Project,” which tracks the nation’s top high school player through his senior season and the 2023 Major League Baseball draft next month, is being released in installments; Episode 3, which was slated for release this week, brings viewers through the midway point of Franklin’s 2023 campaign.
The series falls more in line with the type of work McCorkle prefers to do.
“I’ve always really had the mind for the documentary kind of filmmaking instead of pure mixtapes,” he said. “(The mixtapes are) really what makes me a lot of money from the start, and then I can start going into the documentary stuff, where now I can monetize on YouTube anything I do.”
McCorkle has branched out into merchandising — after selling more Hoop Editz shirts than expected during GCA’s 2019-20 basketball season, he purchased a screen printing machine. But his long-term goals remain centered on filming; as he gets set to begin his freshman year at Wabash, he’s got plenty of ideas about how to keep making Hoop Editz bigger and better.
“I look up to other companies like Overtime and Ballislife,” McCorkle said, “and I still think what I want is bigger than that, because a lot of what they do now is a lot of reposting what other people do. I really want to build the following, be able to get high school kids college exposure for the next level of what they’re trying to do at all different tournaments. Even though I go to about 15 or 20 tournaments a year for Prep Hoops, they have like 60 or 80, so there’s still a lot of room to grow.”
And plenty of time for McCorkle to make it happen.
