Trey Phills is a basketball player like his late dad. He’s also launching a new gym app

Everything Trey Phills does is connected. Every one of his actions has the same ethos — the same “driving force.”

Phills is the son of late Charlotte Hornets swingman Bobby Phills, who died at 30 in a car accident after practice in 2000. With the hopes of living up to his father’s legacy, Trey drove himself to a standout basketball career, making two all-state teams while playing at Charlotte Christian before being named team defensive player of the year three times during a four-year career at Yale. It’s that same drive that turned him pro, playing close to home for the Greensboro Swarm, the Hornets’ NBA G-League affiliate.

And now, that driving force has led him to co-found Gymble, a marketplace app that will connect owners of gyms, fields and other workout venues with personal trainers, pro athletes, or anybody else who needs a private athletic facility. He wants it to be the Airbnb of athletics.

“That marketplace model is something that works, we’re just going to do it in the athletic realm,” Phills, 24, said.

Phills was motivated to create the app in 2019, when he was cut from the G-League’s Windy City Bulls. He came back to Charlotte to train and stay active — waiting for another team to pick him up — but found he could no longer train at his old high school because classes were in session.

After a few hours of Googling and searching, he found two gyms he had never even heard of.

“I was like, ‘Why have I never seen these places before?,’” Phills said. “I grew up in Charlotte, I’m a pro athlete, and I had never heard of these gyms before. If I had this problem, who else had this problem, what other sports had this problem?”

That’s when Phills decided to call his friend, Akim Mitchell, another pro basketball player Phills befriended during his middle school ball days at Charlotte Christian. Mitchell was in Romania, fresh off an honorable mention all-league rookie season with CSM Focșani.

“He really just called me like, ‘Hey, I have this idea, and I just want to run it by you,’” Mitchell, 24, said. “And by the end, I was just like, ‘Wow, what a great idea.’”

Creating the foundation for Gymble

Neither Phills nor Mitchell had any experience developing apps. That’s when Mitchell remembered Devon Oakley, his best friend from his college ball days at Hampton University, an HBCU in Hampton, Va. Oakley, who’s now 25, had worked as a project manager for an app development company in college and had just taken a similar job in Charlotte. Mitchell and Phills told him the idea, and Gymble was born.

From there, though, they hit obstacles. The COVID-19 pandemic put a pause on their professional lives, especially Phills’ and Mitchell’s basketball careers.

Phills’ and Oakley’s laptops were stolen. The original app developer they hired had to leave the project after being diagnosed with COVID. The co-founders were tired and felt like nothing was going for them, but in their minds, it was too good of an idea to abandon.

“We went to a couple of gyms before we started developing, just to see if there was interest,” Mitchell said. “And everybody kept saying, ‘We’ve been waiting for something like this, for somebody to follow through with it.”

So that’s what they did. They followed through with it, and soon, the good signs started coming.

From raising funds to launch day

The best of those good signs was an initial investment round of $50,000, raised entirely from what Mitchell called “friends and family,” including a couple of NBA players and Stephen Silas, current head coach of the Houston Rockets. With the interest growing, the investments coming in and work now continuing unimpeded, the team felt like it was on a roll.

“Once we started to get through all the adversity and we were still pushing forward and making gains,” Mitchell said, “I was like, ‘We can really do this. Like, there’s nothing that can stop us.’”

“It’s crazy how the last two years have worked out,” Phills said. “It’s just been pieces falling into place.”

The climax of all their efforts will come on Saturday, when Gymble will host its official Launch Day Event at Velocity Sports Performance in south Charlotte from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. The carnival-style event will feature games, food, inflatables and free workout classes from some of Gymble’s hosts.

Why Velocity? For Phills, it symbolizes the project coming full circle.

“Velocity was the first meeting I had with a host about Gymble, like a year and a half ago.”

Success off the basketball court

In the future, Phills and his co-founders said they see Gymble as the next big thing in lifestyle space apps, right up there with Airbnb and Peerspace. Whether it’s hosting pro athlete training sessions, adult sports leagues or even kids’ flag football birthday parties, they said they know this has the potential to be a billion-dollar venture.

As for personal goals, Phills’ dreams have not changed — he still wants to live up to his father’s legacy and make the NBA. It’s a dream he just can’t give up. But he also said he knows that one day, that ball will deflate.

“I’ve seen firsthand, through my father, that we don’t have basketball forever,” Phills said. “It can get taken away from you in a single moment.”

Phills said he realized from a very early age that his success couldn’t just be from making the NBA. He wanted to define his own success, and maybe that would come from somewhere other than the basketball court.

He also said he wanted to change not just how success looked for him, but for people who look like him — young, Black men from single-parent or troubled households who don’t feel like they have many options in life. He wants himself and his team to be the models of success they never had growing up.

“Every young black kid feels like they either need to hoop or rap, you know?” Phills said. “So I’m doing what I’m doing to prove that I can be a high performer on the court, but also venture out into other things and create my own definitions of what success is.”