How BYU phenom AJ Dybantsa fits into the church’s long love affair with basketball

Nike. Red Bull. Signature Books.

What do they have in common?

They’ve all signed endorsement deals with AJ Dybantsa.

AJ, of course, is the 18-year-old multimillionaire playing basketball this season at BYU. His story is well known even among people who don’t watch “SportsCenter.” Because it isn’t every day the top recruit in the country chooses BYU over basketball elites like North Carolina and Kansas. Matter of fact, until now, it wasn’t any day.

BYU got the nod because its coach, Kevin Young, teaches NBA-style basketball; because Ace and Chelsea, AJ’s parents, approved; and, not incidentally, because BYU and/or its surrogates agreed to pay him millions of dollars in startup NIL money to seal the deal.

All this was reported a little over a year ago, on Dec. 10, 2024, in, among other places, the Deseret News

Barbara Jones Brown happened to be reading the news that day. Barbara is the director at Signature Books, a small publishing house in downtown Salt Lake that specializes in books about history. (Her husband, Matt, is an editor of Deseret Magazine).

“It was shocking that the No. 1 recruit in the nation chose BYU,” she says. “I realized, even though AJ’s not a Latter-day Saint, that this was Utah history and Mormon history.”

And that’s how a niche publisher in Salt Lake wound up using the signing of a basketball phenom from Massachusetts to intertwine the histories of AJ, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the NCAA, the paying of student-athletes, the sport of basketball in general and BYU basketball in particular — all rolled into one narrative just in time for the only season AJ’s going to spend in Provo.

“I needed a historian who could write as fast as a journalist.”

That’s Barbara, reflecting on the first step in the process that resulted in the release last month of “Game Changers: AJ Dybantsa, BYU and the Struggle for the Soul of Basketball.”

“I knew AJ was going to be BYU’s first one-and-done (because he could go into the NBA at age 19),” she says. “We had to publish by the start of basketball season.”

She found her writer in Matt Bowman, a history professor at Claremont Graduate University in California who authored “The Mormon People,” a critically-acclaimed book published by Knopf in 2012. Bowman, Barbara’s sources told her, had long been fascinated by the church’s relationship with basketball.

“Basketball is intrinsically part of the church,” he said to Barbara. “Think about it, there’s a basketball court in every LDS church building in the nation. What other church can say that?”

So Bowman was all-in, although, since he also carries a full teaching load and has two kids at home and is working on two other book projects, he did have a problem with the six-month time frame Barbara gave him.

“Could I have a co-author?” he asked.

That’s how Bowman’s friend, and fellow basketball aficionado, Wayne LeCheminant, became involved.

Matt and Wayne pack a lot of information into the book’s 243 pages. Through the BYU/church prism, they chart the evolution of college basketball, from the Wild, Wild West days when Walter Byers and the NCAA attempted to bring order to the chaos, to the current Wild, Wild West days when the NCAA has lost all control. They recount BYU’s b-ball history, through the epochs of Mel Hutchins, Kresimir Cosic, Danny Ainge and Jimmer Fredette, right up to the present day of AJ.

All this as a backdrop to the church’s long love affair with basketball.

“We can tell the history of the church through the lens of basketball,” says Bowman. “It’s the story of an American faith finding a sport that expresses values the church takes seriously, most essentially community and cooperation, and sharing that with the culture outside of itself.”

That’s an historian’s way of explaining why basketball courts are in every church building, and how AJ wound up at BYU.

For her part, as Matt and Wayne were working to meet their deadline, Barbara went to work getting permission to put AJ’s name, image and likeness on the cover. Through Dave McCann, a sportscaster and Deseret News columnist, she was put in touch with legendary sports agent Leonard Armato, who is advising the Dybantsas, who in turn introduced her to AJ’s father Ace, his agent.

“I know they’re big shots; they’re just going to shoo me away, a director of a small press in Utah,” she says of the low expectations she had going in.

“But they couldn’t have been nicer. I worked with Ace closely, he’s a really nice, kind, good guy, a quality person.”

The financial deal they struck was not made public, “but compared to all the other money they’re making it’s nothing,” says Barbara, “even if the book is extremely successful, it’s still small potatoes.

“They’re very picky about who they license with,” she laughs, “it’s Nike, it’s Red Bull, and it’s Signature Books.”

When the book was released last month, Barbara met AJ after an early-season game in the Delta Center.

“I told him, ‘I know you’re going to make history at BYU,’ and that made him smile; it was a big smile,” she remembers, “Then, when I looked back a moment later, he was on his phone texting. Just like my 19-year-old daughter.”

“Game Changers” is available wherever books are sold. There’s also an audio version, narrated by former Jazz great Thurl Bailey.