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NEW YORK (FOX 5 NY) - Do you have a young basketball player with hoop dreams, bounding that basketball all hours of the day and night in your home or apartment? Or are you like Queens natives Dylan Kaufmann and Eric Braunstein who just wanted to play basketball as kids?
"Ever since then I would just start playing ball in the house, dribble all the time, anywhere," Braunstein said.
"My dad would always scream at me, 'Go outside—this isn't the gym," Kaufmann added.
The two are best friends from high school and were classmates at Queens College. The 22-year-olds coach youth basketball clinics and decided to invent something to keep dribbling inside the house but eliminate the sound.
"The first thing we needed to realized was we had to have something that could be easily foldable," Braunstein said.
Five years, tons of testing and samples later, Dream Dribble LLC presents the Dream Silencer. At the home used as the set for their Kickstarter campaign, Kaufmann and Braunstein demonstrated their dribbling device while behind the scenes of the Kickstarter video shoot.
"You want to keep it so close to your body," Kaufmann said while demonstrating how to dribble on the device.
The most important element to the Dream Silencer is that you can store the device anywhere in your tiny apartment or home, even under your bed. You release the legs, fold it up, and fit it into a really nifty backpack.
They searched for someone to endorse their product to help acquire investors but Steph Curry and Kyrie Irving weren't exactly available. Then while they were watching the Knicks game on Christmas Day, the TV camera zoomed in on the crowd and focused on Tim Hardaway, who was well-known for his crossover dribbling style.
"A text just came over the phone," Hardaway told Fox 5. "I don't know how they got my number."
Kaufmann and Braunstein had no idea if it was really Hardaway until they did a video chat. Hardaway wasn't sure if dribbling indoors without making noise was even possible until he got to demo the product and realized it is a great idea and will help parents at home.
"Instead of being at the workout facility or having someone work you out, you can do this at home," Hardaway said, "just by getting down and you just dribble with your head up and get the fundamentals of dribbling with your head up and get the repetition that you need."
Dream Dribble's website, Kickstarter campaign for the Dream Silencer, and social media accounts are all live. Once the Dream Silencer is fully funded and production is underway for sales, maybe we'll see more ballers from the New York area taking over March Madness.