Lil Wayne’s Young Money APAA Sports has potential to make history with Quinnen Williams

When top NFL draft prospect and Alabama standout Quinnen Williams announced he was signing with Young Money APAA Sports in January, his agent, Nicole Lynn, knew she’d be in for a ride.

Perhaps it was because she was signing a top defensive lineman, a 6-foot-3-inch, 300-pound Outland Trophy winner, to the same agency that reps the name and face of rapper Lil Wayne and all that comes with the Young Money brand. Or, she knows that if Williams does indeed go No. 2 overall as projected, Lynn will become the first African American woman to represent a top-five draft pick in the NFL. Either way, Lynn is living out her dream of helping athletes fulfill their full potential, an act that is along the same lines as Lil Wayne’s vision.

“Lil Wayne got into the business for the same reason I got into the business,” Lynn said. “He wanted to give back to players. He wanted to help them when football was over. At the end of the day, we can all identify with this. Lil Wayne doesn’t need this money, this sports money. It isn’t for that. He’s doing it for a bigger purpose, and I love that. I love working with people every day that walk with the same purpose, and that’s superpowerful.”

Off the field, Williams is described as the prototypical gentle giant with a magnetic personality, pleasant to be around, a team player. On the field, however, Williams is the epitome of a competitor: controlled and focused on the task at hand. Menacing to some and a true challenge to others. In his last season at Alabama, Williams started 15 games and led the team with 70 total stops, 12 quarterback hurries, 18.5 tackles for loss, 7 sacks and a safety.

It wasn’t much of a shock when he was one of four players from Alabama to enter the NFL draft, but Williams also became one of the growing number of athletes to join a sports agency attached to an entertainment company. After signing to Young Money APAA Sports in January, Williams became one of eight agency clients in the 2019 NFL draft class, joining Mecole Hardman Jr., D’Andre Walker, Gary Johnson, Jakobi Meyers, Dennis Daley, Emeke Egbule and Jamal Davis II.

Williams will also join a mixed list of more than 60 veteran athletes as well as up-and-comers represented by Young Money APAA, including second-year Washington Redskins running back Derrius Guice, New England Patriots defensive backs Devin and Jason McCourty, Jacksonville Jaguars running back Dimitri Flowers and former NFL wide receiver Nate Burleson.

Williams was exactly what Young Money APAA Sports envisioned when the agency was founded. After signing, Williams was also in awe of his new Young Money family.

“I signed with, like, basically Drake and Nicki Minaj. That’s crazy,” Williams told ESPN.

With Williams, Lynn was stepping into territory out of her usual realm of veteran players, and she learned to appreciate everything that comes with the sought-after player.

“When I met Quinnen for the first time, I was shocked to see that he was just as impressed with me as I was with him,” Lynn said. “He told me that he couldn’t believe I had never repped a first-round draft pick but he wanted to change that. He believed in me, and I am forever grateful.”

Lynn’s career as an agent began only four years ago. Before she entered the world of sports agency in 2015, she was a financial analyst at Morgan Stanley. But Lynn soon realized the hours she clocked every day took her away from what she actually wanted to achieve.

“I always knew I wanted to be an agent, or that I wanted to do this role,” Lynn said. “I didn’t necessarily know what it was called. I knew that I wanted to help athletes; I knew I wanted to help to maintain their wealth.”

Lynn did a little more research and learned that the sports agency world checked the boxes of everything she had wanted to do. Armed with new information, she applied to law school at the University of Oklahoma, where she had earned a bachelor’s degree in business management, in 2012 in anticipation of taking the agent exam. From there, Lynn landed a six-month internship with the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) in Washington, D.C.

“My goal was to learn how to be an expert in all of the benefits that a player gets,” Lynn said. “Their insurance, their annuities, etc. And I figured that would be something that would set me apart as an agent. Agents don’t do that, so I wanted to be different and have an expertise in that, and life after football.”

After a stint with the NFLPA, Lynn landed a job with the PlayersRep Sports Agency, at the time a top-10 agency, where her focus would be offering the best services to potential athletes and future clients.

Enter Lil Wayne.

Young Money APAA Sports was officially established in 2016 after years of conversations and idea exchanges between rapper and Young Money Entertainment CEO Lil Wayne and manager and Young Money COO Cortez Bryant.

In 2017, Young Money APAA acquired PlayersRep Sports Agency, where Lynn worked at the time, to help grow the new brand. With the new acquisition came more clients and experienced agents, including Lynn. The agency also enlisted the help of Adie von Gontard, a sports-savvy businessman whose grandfather owned the St. Louis Cardinals and great-grandfather founded brewing company Anheuser-Busch.

“With this specific agency, which, effectively, is the same agency with a twist — that’s kind of the way I look at it — it’s been great,” Lynn said. “The addition of Lil Wayne, Cortez, Mack Maine and Adie von Gontard, it has been just really great. We already had a really good agency with great agents and players, so now we just have been taken to the next level. Some of the rooms maybe we couldn’t get in before, we can get in. Some of the marketing deals we weren’t able to accomplish, we’ve been able to accomplish. So all it did was just really take us and put us into a different category of agencies.”

In its three-year existence, Young Money APAA went from three certified agents to more than 50. The sports agency now represents more than 80 athletes across sports, including football, basketball, boxing and softball.

Lil Wayne and Bryant have been sports fans their entire lives but decided they wanted to contribute more to the sports industry. The two drew parallels between sports and music and began formulating ideas for how a sports agency would fit with their well-established entertainment company. After having a firm grasp on what it’d take to develop the agency, the two discussed what the main focuses would be.

“I think that it got more serious because we’ve got a couple of friends that are athletes,” Bryant said. “They were kind of telling their testimony and their stories, how they were hooking up with agents and basically after the contract phase they were kind of out on their own. They didn’t have anybody to guide them or to help them along the way. We saw that, and we understood that most these guys had cross-trained backgrounds, coming from poverty-stricken neighborhoods growing up and coming into a whole lot of money at a very young age. We’ve had our fair share of bumping our heads.”

Taking everything into consideration and realizing this is something they truly wanted to do, Wayne and Bryant began the formal process of turning their dreams of a sports agency into reality.

The first order of business after establishing Young Money APAA was client services and ensuring that the only thing athletes had to worry about was becoming better in their respective sports. The agency would handle the rest. They laid out in clear terms what they were offering to potential clients and promised that they’d help their players build a solid brand.

“Even if they have the longest career, they’re still going to be superyoung with a lot of life left after that,” Bryant said. “We try to help structure that vision and help them grow while they have that opportunity and this window to be successful and make a lot of money. We want to ensure that they’re making the right decisions, financial decisions, and try to do the right thing to build their brand outside a deal so that when they’re ready to hang it up or, Lord forbid, something happens, you have a plan set up post-sports, a vision that can take them throughout their lives and take care of their family.”

Although Bryant believes the agency is still fighting to be respected as one of the best in the industry, it’s still clawing to be the best and improving each year. There’s no end in sight.

“As an agency, I want to make sure that we establish ourselves with integrity so that we can create partnerships for our athletes that can help them in the long run,” Bryant said. “People come to the brand because they know what it’s done and that it’s established. So corporate brands, they tend to partner with us because they know with our portfolio and our roster of artists. … Right now, I’m in a cultivation state. I’m out here breaking doors down, trying to figure it out on the sports side.

“We’re still young. People don’t know me. These people must think that Wayne is signing these contracts and he’s negotiating deals. They don’t understand that we have a whole team and we really built a reputable company. We have agents outside in the cold to talk to. We’ve got agents on board with us with 20-plus years of experience. We value ourselves in doing good business around the board; that’s not gonna change. We built integrity in the Young Money brand, and we’re planning on doing the same thing in sports. People don’t get it, and that’s OK. They’ll get it one day.”

Although Lynn’s achievement in signing Williams is just one of the highlights in her still-rising career, there’s still an uphill battle as one of the few female sports agents in a predominantly white, male-dominated field. Of the 830 NFLPA-certified agents, only 5% are women.

“I had to get used to being the only one in every room that I walk in,” Lynn said. “Even as an attorney, I work in a male-dominated field. But there’s just something different in sports because you are really the only one, right? Every room I walk in, I just have to assume there’s gonna be no women in the room. I have to assume that I will be identified, or when somebody needs me they will assume that I am the marketing rep, or that I’m a girlfriend of a player, or that I’m a wife. Their first thought will never be that I’m an agent.”

Lynn acknowledges that these numbers won’t change overnight, but with support and backing from a sports agency like Young Money APAA Sports, the future is bright.

“First and foremost, obviously you want him to be a good football player. It makes your job easier,” Lynn said of her clients. “But I tend to represent a lot of veteran players. Not on purpose, but those are the ones that typically flock to me, mostly because they are older, they’re more mature. A lot of times they’re married, they’re with kids, and they appreciate what I bring to the table. They appreciate that I care about their entire family, and so my hope is to work with individuals that are just good guys, just good guys that love the game and just want to be great. You don’t always have those clients, and that’s OK. I think it’s great to be a light in darkness. So I get the opportunity to work with guys who aren’t like that sometimes, and I do everything I can to turn it around.”