Josh Englert’s path to becoming a content creator capturing the game, as well as future NBA players, began when he bought his first camera, a Canon 80D, after graduating high school. The Minneapolis-native began experimenting with video content, even filming music videos for his friends, and eventually, Englert found himself traveling around Minnesota to shoot high school basketball events.
At the time, future NBA stars Jalen Suggs and Chet Holmgren were dominating at Minnehaha Academy, while former National Player of the Year and Uconn star Paige Bueckers was transcending the women’s game at Hopkins High School. The 22-year-old brought his camera along to a few matchups and started shooting the three future McDonald’s All-Americans. He’d then post the flicks onto social media and tag the players.
Next thing he knew, the content started going viral.
“I went to go film Jalen [Suggs’] game, and that was different,” Englert says. “I’ve never seen anything like it before. I was like, ‘There are high school players playing like NBA players,’ pretty much with how high they can jump and everything and how good they were. I came from a small private high school, so I never saw anything like that.”
The budding following led to an opportunity with SLAM and WSLAM to cover Suggs and Bueckers’ senior year, which Englert did all while attending college and doing freelance work around Minnesota. Although he studied a bit of film and production in school, Englert considers himself more as a “self-taught” videographer who learned from Youtube and other creators, too.
“One thing you can’t teach is a creative mind. You can get all the fancy cameras, but you gotta know how to use it, gotta know how to put a good video together, you have to keep people watching it, and that’s the hard part.”
As a creative, Englert wants his content to have a more cinematic-feel to it, “like a movie with different angles I get, color, telling a story with all my videos. Even within seven seconds, I can tell a story,” he says.
HIs work has caught the attention of Lynx forward Aerial Powers, who was looking to add a videographer to her team during the 2021 season. Since then, he’s continued working with players in both the WNBA and NBA, including Phoenix Suns’ Josh Okogie as his personal videographer, as well as Anthony Edwards.
“Last year was my first year filming NBA,” Englert says. “The first week of doing it, like the first week of games, preseason, and then up until like the third regular season game, I would say the whole time I was filming the games, it literally felt like a dream…It literally didn’t feel real. I was like, ‘Dang, I’m really here doing this.’”
Aside from shooting basketball content, which includes filming pre-NBA Draft workout videos for potential prospects, Englert has also shot real estate and fitness content. Like the players he works with, Englert is just as versatile within the videography game—during his senior year, he even filmed a short documentary about a friend’s life for a final project that won multiple awards and has been played at various film festivals, including the Minnesota Film Festival.
As he continues to build a following, Englert says he takes pride in making high-quality content and wants to continue “filming the NBA as much as possible” right now. For him, this is really just the beginning, and eventually, he even wants to bring a team of creators together to shoot content, too.
“Even to this day, I’m lost for words of how everything just came to be and how grateful I am for everybody [taking] a chance on me.”
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