What Happened To The HoopMaps App From Shark Tank Season 9?

While many people associate "Shark Tank" with products like Bombas socks and the Scrub Daddy sponge, there are plenty of tech-savvy pitches on the program as well. In fact, many entrepreneurs have come onto the show hoping to convince the sharks to invest in their apps, be it the educational coding program Hopscotch or Season 9's CoinOut. In that vein of optimistic inventors and confident business people, Donte and Dominic Morris had big dreams for both their app and the future of basketball itself.

The Morris brothers appeared on Season 9, Episode 9 of "Shark Tank," hoping to successfully pitch the sharks on HoopMaps, a mobile app for finding pickup basketball games. The entrepreneurs found themselves facing off against a line-up of Mark Cuban, Kevin O'Leary, Lori Greiner, Barbara Corcoran, and New York Yankees legend Derek Jeter. While Jeter was more fond of America's pastime, did he and the other sharks want to go onto the court with Donte and Dominic, and what happened to HoopMaps after its time swimming in the "Shark Tank?"

Twin brothers Donte and Dominic Morris of Oakland, California entered the proverbial tank seeking a $100,000 investment for five percent equity in their startup, HoopMaps. HoopMaps was a mobile app with a pretty simple goal — helping you find pickup basketball games near you. After a quick introduction from the twins and an equally brief game of basketball with Mark Cuban and guest shark Derek Jeter, they got down to business.

The Morrises explained that, to date, they had 50,000 registered users on HoopMaps, with the average daily user figure being around 10,000. Though they had a relatively strong user base for the early stage they were at, the sharks were all incredibly skeptical of how the app could make money. The twins had a paid subscription tier in mind for that but didn't have any good answers as to what benefits that paid tier could offer that would convert free users over to spending money, only offering up the idea of premium user-only games. If the subscriptions didn't pan out, they planned to monetize the app via advertising and brand partnerships.

Lori Greiner, Kevin O'Leary, Barbara Corcoran, Jeter, and Cuban all opted out in that order, mainly over concerns about monetization. On their way out, O'Leary told them to focus more on return on investment in future investor pitches, while Jeter suggested that they find basketball prospects to endorse the app in exchange for equity in the company.

Though HoopMaps didn't get an investment from any of the sharks when they pitched on "Shark Tank," Mark Cuban was impressed enough to offer the Morris twins some assistance in networking with people who could help them grow the company. 

"In his mind, he made that connection and he ended up helping us out," said Donte Morris in a 2020 interview with The State Hornet, referring to the tenacity that they displayed during their pitch. "Mark Cuban connected us to Ice Cube." The rapper/actor had founded Big 3, a professional three-on-three basketball league, and Big 3 started partnering with HoopMaps. "You never know what a network can cash in," Donte added. In a 2019 column for Starter Story, Dominic Morris explained that the Big 3 deal was "an advertising trade," with each promoting the other in place of buying ad/sponsorship space from each other.

Dominic also laid out some of their other partnerships in that column. "I also did a partnership with US Cryotherapy the muscle recovery company," he wrote. "We created online content incorporating HoopMaps users using the product as well as having signage for downloads in their locations. We worked out a rev share. We partner up with college wellness centers, and all facets of rec basketball communities to funnel them all on our platform." By that point, HoopMaps had 90,000 registered users, an 80% increase in roughly two years. 

By all appearances, HoopMaps is no more, despite a promising first impression. According to a post on Shark Tank Blog, the app was no longer functioning by June 2021. Now, it seems the Android app is gone from the Google Play Store, and the iOS version has vanished from the Apple App Store. Granted, the official HoopMaps website is still functional, but it's largely a placeholder for the Morris' attempted pivot beyond basketball, Curated Runs. 

As for the HoopMaps social media pages? The Instagram page hasn't seen any posts since July 2021, and it hasn't posted about HoopMaps proper since a year earlier.  The app's official Twitter/X account also hasn't posted since the summer of 2020, and the same goes for the last substantive post on its Facebook page. The only post after that, which has zero engagement, is an April 2022 post that said HoopMaps is now on WhatsApp without explaining what that meant.

The HoopMaps YouTube channel is, somewhat curiously given the relative level of effort involved compared to the other social media accounts, the one that lasted the longest, getting several updates past the summer 2020 cutoff for the others. But it also hasn't been updated in a long time, with the last video coming in May 2022.

At least from the obvious starting point, their LinkedIn pages, it's not clear what either Morris twin has been doing for a living since HoopMaps went dormant during the summer of 2020. Both Dominic and Donte's LinkedIn pages have no new jobs or companies added since then and still show them running HoopMaps. The public-facing versions of their personal Facebook pages don't list any workplace information, either.

News searches aren't much help beyond The Sacramento Bee reporting on a spring 2021 baseball game that the twins promoted as a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Negro Leagues, similar to another Negro League tribute game that they organized while students at Sacramento State in 2008 and again in 2012. Neither does trying to pin down other social media pages, with Donte's Twitter/X page dormant for years and the same applying to the twins' Morris League amateur baseball league. The Morris League website, meanwhile, went dormant before even HoopsMap's social media channels did.

Whatever Donte and Dominic Morris are doing as of September 2024, it's not something that can be found on the public internet.

"Shark Tank" is available for purchase on Prime Video.