Will Custis is what the basketball world calls a Corporate Hooper. Wake Forest degree, business career, intramural leagues for the obsession. He works in business. He lives for the game. And for years he watched an entire category of players get ignored by the supplements industry.
Nobody had built anything for them. Not really.
The Gap Nobody Was Filling
The supplements industry has spent decades designing for bodybuilders, runners, and generic athletes. Basketball — a sport that demands lateral movement, explosive bursts, sustained focus, and recovery across a grueling season — didn’t have a product category of its own. So Custis built one.
Seven months of testing formulas, sourcing ingredients, and consulting Tim DiLeo, an Assistant Director of Sports Nutrition at a Division I basketball program. Then Custis sold his house to fund the launch. HoopFuel went to market with two products built from the ground up around basketball’s specific demands: HoopFuel Hydrate — a clean electrolyte mix formulated for an hour on the court, 1,000mg sodium, 200mg potassium — and a full basketball-specific supplement stack.
No Quick Program. No Hack.
In his own training documentation — the kind that hits 420,000 plays on a question alone — Custis has made the philosophy plain: “This is not an anti-running post. This is a pro-basketball post.” Rec leaguers, weekend warriors, corporate hoopers. The people who play at every level except the one with a salary. That is the audience.
HoopFuel partnered with Miami VIS and runs the HoopFuel League with Hoops Klub, Brooklyn’s premier basketball facility. It partnered with UConn Women’s Basketball to build a first-of-its-kind on-court hydration program. The origin story is told live in the content, to 52,000 views on the announcement post: “Follow along as I create and scale a supplement and nutrition brand for the basketball community.”
The Market Is Proving Him Right
The assumption was that grassroots basketball didn’t need premium tools. The NBA had sports science. Everyone else had Gatorade. HoopFuel disrupts that assumption because the person at the center isn’t a marketer guessing — he’s the target customer himself. Custis plays 4-5 times a week. Every product decision gets tested in his own games first.
He sold his house because he believed in the gap. The market is starting to prove him right.
