The Sublime basketball camp paused daily around 11 a.m. every day in late July as teenagers from the US, Spain and other countries gathered to watch an NBA champion workout before lunch. Payton Pritchard showcased his now widely-publicized routine where friends, professionals and college players challenge him defensively with physicality, different schemes and double-teams that sometimes become triple-teams.
“The two biggest things that we really made sure the kids understood is how hard every single rep was,” Pritchard’s friend and business partner Michael Soares told CLNS Media. “(Pritchard) trains so hard during training that a basketball game feels easy to him. So we’re really preaching to the kids that every rep does matter, and you never know when the last time you’ll be on the court is, so really push yourself. And also, a lot of the workouts that Payton had, we’d have three or four defenders. So cheers to him for … helping the kids realize how smart you have to be to play basketball. We’d send one defender, two defenders, three defenders and Payton was reading the fourth guy, so teaching these kids that basketball … it’s a whole team sport, so understanding the concepts is very important.”
Pritchard and the other hosts at the camp wanted to express how hard he trains to produce his results on the NBA floor. It’s a characteristic of American basketball his friend Pablo Ferreiro loved, and he imagined combining that and the skill development expertise of the US with European advanced team concepts to create a diverse development environment for kids. In July, Pritchard and Ferreiro hosted their first Sublime camps in Spain.
Ferreiro brought the idea, a camp with a focus on thinking the game, to his childhood friend Pritchard after retiring from basketball himself after 2024. A native of Lugo in Spain, he traveled to Oregon for several summers growing up to live, workout and occasionally fight with Pritchard over 2K and FIFA. He’d stay for 3-5 months at a time, and credited the trips in part with him forging a professional career with Leyma Coruña and other second division Spanish teams.
“(We were) playing all day, really, there’s no secret about him,” Ferreiro said. “Sometimes we would do the drills he’s doing, now you see on videos like the ball (handling) stuff, we’d do that every day or maybe a couple times, so it depends. In summer, we worked out two times a day minimum. In high school season, we would even wake up before school, like sometimes at 7, sometimes at 6, to go lift weights and shoot, and after school (we’d) practice a couple of times and yeah, now you understand what it takes to be there.”
Pritchard, in turn, visited Ferreiro in Spain, and forged a friendship that bordered closer to family. They pushed each other to a professional level on the basketball court, and exposed each other to the differences between American and European basketball culture.
So when Ferreiro imagined the idea of a camp that combined the emphasizes on either side of the Atlantic, Pritchard didn’t pause before endorsing it. Let’s do it, he said.
“In America, right now, the skills development, the skills training is way more advanced than in Europe,” Ferreiro said. “You can (tell) by how skilled NBA players are on the American national team. You have guys with with great size, with great outside (shooting) and amazing skills for the height, very good talent individually, one-on-one, a lot of arsenal moves. They’re really good offensively, but then, what we’re seeing is that they lack sometimes, not lack, but I think we train way more the ‘team concept,’ the spacing, basketball-reading IQ … When you look at a European player like Luka, like Jokić, you can tell how smart they are in the game and when you see World Cups … (the) national team of Serbia, (the) French national team, you see how well we do with less talented players.”
Ferreiro hosted the first of two sessions in Ribadeo, near where he grew up, before Pritchard joined the following one a week later in El Vendrell, outside Barcelona. They included coaches and skills trainers from the US and Spain alongside participants from Spanish cities, Boston, Orlando and LA in the US, as well as players from Switzerland, Sweden and Poland.
They focused on fundamentals like ball-handling and footwork before advancing to concepts like how to handle advantage situations, 2-on-1s, or even 3-on-3, 4-on-4 and 5-on-5 matchups, among others. The afternoons ended with one-on-one competitions. Pritchard has also wanted to revive the spirit of one-on-one play through his 1ofOne company with Soares, who hosted their second annual youth tournament in Boston this summer.
“(Ferreiro) had the vision of wanting to do a Spain camp,” Pritchard said after 1ofOne. “So it’s his idea, and I used to go to Spain as a kid growing up, too. So it was a nice way to come over there, doing an elite camp over there, but also come back and visit some of the parts, some of the people that I haven’t seen in a while. It’s something that will continue every summer … (we) got connected when I was a young kid through his dad and my dad, and then they started having my dad do camps over in Spain when I was in fourth or fifth grade. He’s like a brother.”
Soares noticed a quiet camp grow louder as the week advanced. Players with different backgrounds and first languages found ways to connect over basketball. Pritchard stepped in to correct certain drills, while he drew more questions about his professional experience and the journey with each passing day.
Around midday, some players went to the beach for a nap, a Spanish tradition, while dinnertime exposed many of the Americans to paella for the first time. They walked on the boardwalk as a group and stayed in dorms before rising at 8:30 for breakfast. Later in the week, the long-running debate over how the NBA and EuroLeague compare to each other broke out. Pritchard settled on smart players being able to adapt to any league or style. Even NBA role players have gone to the EuroLeague and succeeded, they acknowledged.
“It was funny to see some kids like getting alley-oops from an NBA player,” Soares said. “I had never had that opportunity when I was younger, so it was a surreal moment to see some of these kids engaging with him, and then after lunch, Payton would have a sit down talk with the kids too, just ask life questions, ask sports questions, ask questions about being a better teammate. A lot of these kids can Google how to do certain drills, but what they can’t get is experience and advice from somebody literally living in their dream.”
The campers also watched Pritchard and Soares participate in one of his famous pro-am style exhibitions. Pritchard poured 74 points on the European competitors they assembled. Coaches in attendance compared the experience to watching him on TV, how much more physical he appears in-person, the intensity of his dribbles, how quickly he stops-and-starts and his quickness stood out.
Sublime followed another round of Cape Cod runs this summer where Pritchard invited former teammates, overseas professionals and Celtics trainer Zay Covington for a week of workouts aimed at challenging him. The concept wasn’t new, but followed a season where Pritchard played a more consistent role and preceded one where he’ll likely take on more responsibility following offseason losses and Jayson Tatum’s injury. That forced him to balance his past approach of emptying the tank after sitting all year with finding ways to challenge himself while recovering from 2025.
Pritchard recently expressed no preference between starting or come off the bench, whatever the team needs, but he has long embraced bigger challenges with each passing year. His goals for the runs remained similar, increasing his ability to unload difficult, off-platform shots efficiently, identifying a variety of coverages and defenders, all while allowing defenders to rotate in-and-out while he works continuously to exhaustion. Pritchard stacked the opposing team, instructed them to defend him physically and invited a manager from Merrimack College to track his statistics.
Payton Pritchard's offseason workouts are really a different level 🤯 He has overseas and college players guarding him and trying to get a stop on every rep and live action. pic.twitter.com/20LFJvzcpa
— Ball Don't Stop (@balldontstop) September 3, 2025
“Zay Covington will send a lift or when he can, he’d come down and lift with us and put us through a lift,” Pritchard’s friend Brooks DeBisschop said. “Taking care of the body and then go over to the high school nearby and doing the same one-on-one stuff we’ve always done. This summer’s been a lot more three-on-three, trying to put him in different actions that he’s gonna be in, whether it’s wide pin downs or flare-slip situations, pick-and-roll stuff … coming off a handoff, running away from the rim and (being) able to catch square and get a shot up, some of those difficult shots, and then he’s been working on his in-between stuff which he’s already really efficient at (and) adding a floater to his game.”
A similar routine last summer vaulted Pritchard to Sixth Man of the Year status. Some players like DeBisschop and Paul White, Pritchard’s former Oregon teammate, stuck around for the full week. Others came-and-went between Boston and the high school in Harwich. Soares managed the personnel, bringing in big men when necessary and at other times longer wings, specifying what Pritchard needed on a particular day.
In the drills, Pritchard found spots on the floor to practice his isolation game against multiple defenders from, repeating the reps over-and-over. On the first day, White leaned in after a pump-fake and caught an elbow that left him bloodied on the side of his face. He later split his lip open, adding some flare to the social media highlights, though he stressed neither hit came from Pritchard.
“Or else he would have been in a trash can,” White joked.
“The defenders are very aggressive. That’s one thing Payton ends up telling them … he wants them to be as as aggressive as they can. They can come double him. They can come do whatever they feel they need to. He’s gonna fight through the foul. He doesn’t want dirty basketball, of course. He doesn’t want someone that’s gonna start wrestling out there, but he likes the physicality, he likes the challenge and so he wants to make his training days harder than what the NBA game may look like for him.”
Playing with Payton Pritchard can be dangerous, just take it from his former Oregon teammate, Paul Wilson 🦆
Looks like Pritchard bloodied him while training today
(Via @pdubbb13 on IG) pic.twitter.com/rhJIg3AKHA
— Daniel Donabedian (@danield1214) June 27, 2025
The workouts provided White a chance to progress in his recovery from ACL surgery, often joining Pritchard as a teammate in the other phase of the workouts — the open runs. There, another former Oregon teammate Will Johnson drew up schemes for Pritchard’s team to play against, trying to mix up defensive looks and emulate what he could see this season. Pritchard told Johnson wanted to become an escape artist against the traps he faced.
Defenders used arm bars against him while the matchups tried to simulate NBA length. His finishing and in-between game have improved through the process, and like he told the campers in Spain, he needed to emphasize every repetition in practice to get there. After 2-2.5 hours, they finished the Cape Cod days at the pool, golfing or going out to dinner.
“I always joke, he never gets tired,” Johnson said. “Everybody who knows him knows when he’s playing, we would be in the summer runs and you would have pros and ex-NBA guys come back and guys playing overseas, we’d be playing all summer, but he would want to keep going game after game after game, and when other guys retired, ready to pack it up, he’s like, ‘no, one more, let’s keep going.'”
At the end of the Spanish camp, Pritchard and Soares received encouragement from players who intended to return for next year. They vouched for the camp to come to their homes, and while Ferreiro wouldn’t comment on Boston’s candidacy as the next location, he said to expect more Sublime sessions to come. The mindset they taught, thinking the game, thriving off-ball, moving and defending, all helped Pritchard survive stretches in Boston where he didn’t receive significant opportunity. They also used Steph Curry’s off-ball dominance as an example.
Two years earlier, in 2023, Joe Mazzulla hosted a Celtics summer camp across from their facility where he stressed spacing to young players. He physically moved them to locations on the floor to the best positions for a given possession, and after, mentioned how those team concepts show at younger ages in the European game, which he studies. He stressed for the Celtics to think the game in order to gain an advantage on top of their talent.
“You see the difference at the younger levels, especially whether it’s in Europe or international basketball, compared to American basketball,” Mazzulla said. “The dynamics are different, the court is different, shot clocks are different, and so when you can get a continuity to where people are understanding those concepts, understanding how that game is played at a higher level, I think it helps the development process.”
Pritchard brought the same message to Spain, where Ferreiro walked away impressed by the work ethic of the American players. It’s a passion he already saw in his trips to the US growing up, lauding how much Americans care deeply about sports from a young age. He wants to instill that passion in the European development system, while stressing connectivity and advanced team concepts in the American youth sports.
The best of both worlds.
“In Spain, it would be always team practice, not many individual training,” Ferreiro said. “In the US, it’s the other way around. You will have like a high school practice, but then you would train by yourself like 1-2 times a day sometimes. So I think now, since everything is globalized, the information is being shared that much, I think the approach would be similar in both continents year-by-year, and the players too.”
