BY PATRICK BREEN
SPECIAL TO PASCACK PRESS
PASCACK VALLEY—Three former Pascack-area athletes came together over quarantine to launch Elevate Sports Media, a company that provides budding pro baseball players with premier athlete concierge services.
Niko Mokanos, a former varsity athlete at St. Joseph Regional High School, founded the company with the help of Marc Hernandez and Paul Sullivan, who both won multiple state titles playing baseball at Pascack Hills.
Elevate Sports Media targets college athletes, draft prospects, and young major leaguers who might not typically gain notice from the big sports agencies, and pairs them up with advertisers, influencers, and media connections.
Mokanos told Pascack Press last week, “The bigger agencies won’t give some of these players the time of day right now because they’re not turning the profit that a true major leaguer would, and that’s where we come in.”
Since its inception in 2020, Elevate Sports Media — “building brands, creating legacies” — has worked with nine professional athletes, 15 up and coming draft prospects, and many more coaches, influencers, and baseball managers.
Many of these connections came through cold calls and emails during the early stages of the pandemic, but Mokanos has been fostering his connections with talented athletes since high school.
“Going to a school like St. Joe’s with a lot of competitive sports, you’re surrounded by a lot of high quality athletes,” said Mokanos, “A lot of the guys get drafted or play very high end competitive college baseball, basketball, or football.”
One connection Mokanos made through the St. Joe’s baseball team is Justyn-Henry Malloy, a 2018 graduate who was drafted by the Atlanta Braves, and is playing for the Toledo Mud Hens, a Triple-A affiliate of the Detroit Tigers. While working with Elevate Sports Media, Malloy was able to get verified on Instagram and attain sponsorships with Rise Brewing Company, Mizuno Baseball, and LV Lumber Bats, an organization that donates nearly a quarter of its profits to fighting pediatric cancer.
“I thought this could be a really good network for me to tap into once I was done playing,” added Mokanos, “since there are a lot of great athletes here, a lot of great people in the county and at St. Joe’s.”
Mokanos, 22, from Hillsdale, who graduated from St. Joe’s in 2019, is the company’s CEO. He got to know his business partners when the Green Knights played Pascack Hills in baseball.
“I played Mark and Paul in high school twice and they beat us once and then we beat them. There were always just high levels of competition and really great talent across the board,” he said.
Hernandez won the Group II state baseball championship in 2018 and 2019, and Sullivan was on that team for just 2018 before graduating. That 2018 team went 30-2 overall, and were League Champions and Bergen County Champions in addition to winning that Group II state title.
Business leverages passions
Sullivan, 23, from Montvale, graduated Hills in 2018 and is chief operating officer. Hernandez, 22, from Montvale, graduated Hills in 2019 and is director of marketing, and coordinates name, image, and likeness rules.
“We know that athletes are not just the sport they play and what they do on the field, but are so much more,” Hernandez tells Pascack Press. “We do our best to bring out our athletes’ passions and beliefs and have them work with brands that fit their personal vision and lifestyle.”
Since founding Elevate Sports Media, Mokanos graduated from The College of Saint Rose in Albany, N.Y. with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. He was the captain of their Division-III baseball team, the Golden Knights.
Aside from his work at Elevate, Mokanos works as a sales associate with Leasing Resources Incorporated, and as a part time baseball coach at Wow Factor Baseball.
“We still have to find ways to get consistent revenue in the business,” he said, “but I would like to be heavily involved in the college space and working with professional athletes consistently in the next five to 10 years.”
Mokanos said he believes many of the connections he is making will be useful in the future. Aside from the company’s financials, their brand has a large following on social media from baseball fans, travel teams, and other athletes.
Their Instagram, elevatemediasports, has more than 3,000 followers, and the company has also had multiple viral TikToks highlighting some of their most prominent prospects, such as Joshua Kuroda-Grauer, a Division-I baseball player at Rutgers, and Devin Ortiz, a St. Joe’s grad in the San Diego Padres organization.
“Some of my partners and I would like to be certified agents through the MLBPA, and we would like to be at the MLB draft and at places where we can truly network with more executives and more athletes,” Mokanos told us.
He said “Right now it’s just not feasible, but that’s OK, it’s going to take a long time and I’m not sure where Elevate’s going to end up, but that would be my goal: to get certified and just have some more consistent money coming in.”
For now, Mokanos and his business partners plan to continue recruiting the next generation of professional athletes.
Although their company is relatively small, they said they believe this allows them to work more closely with their players and craft more specific plans to highlight their athlete’s abilities and interests.
— Freelance journalist Patrick Breen of Hillsdale graduated St. Joseph Regional High School with a 4.0 GPA in 2018. A graduate of Fordham College at Rose Hill, he is editor-in-chief of his music interview podcast “Pop Culture Nerd,” with listeners in 16 countries.