Football standout Tyquan Scott finds SlamBall path through a friend's call

Tyquan Scott arrived in SlamBall with the kind of frame that changes a game before the first whistle. At 6-foot-7 and 245 pounds, the Long Beach native looked built for contact, and the Buzzsaw turned that profile into a second overall pick in the 2023 draft. What made Scott stand out was not just size, but the way his football background showed up on every defensive possession, turning the trampoline league’s open space into a collision zone.

Scott’s road to Las Vegas was anything but conventional. A friend from prep school called with a strange opportunity, sent him highlights, and helped explain a sport Scott had never seen from a trampoline, let alone played on one. He still made the trip, joined one of the eight teams in SlamBall’s rebooted 56-player pool, and became one of the clearest examples of the league’s build from imported athleticism, where football players, basketball players, track athletes and dunk specialists all had to adapt fast to a game that combines basketball, football, hockey and trampolines.

The fit made sense almost immediately. Scott had already built a multidimensional résumé at Long Beach High School, where he played basketball, football, track and volleyball, led the basketball team in scoring and won the state high-jump championship. That blend of power and bounce carried through to Herkimer University, where he averaged 17.5 points per game and shot 29 percent from 3-point range, before a stint overseas in Indonesia that produced 7.6 points and 6.0 rebounds per game. The league even drew a comparison between Scott and former No. 1 overall pick Rob Wilson, a nod to how closely his size and style matched the kind of stopper SlamBall prizes.

Once the season started in Las Vegas, Scott’s value lived on the defensive end. He finished the year with 3 points and 124 stops across 15 games and 278 minutes, with his biggest impact coming from disrupting possessions rather than finishing them. In Week 2, when Buzzsaw went 3-1, Scott was named Defensive Player of the Week after piling up 30 stops, 33 loose-ball recoveries and four steals. One of those steals sparked Jamaal Barnes Jr.’s game-winning slam against the Lava with 10.8 seconds left, the kind of sequence that shows exactly what opponents felt when Scott got loose in the lane.

Scott’s disruption did not fade as the season went on. He finished second in the league with 8.3 loose-ball recoveries per game, behind only Gage Smith’s 9.8, added 12 stops in a later win over the Mob, and posted eight stops and 11 loose-ball recoveries in a game where he scored his first three points of the season on a fourth-quarter slam. For Buzzsaw, Scott was more than a good story. He was the reason the defense could turn a possession into a problem, and a problem into points.