On a gray and chilly February morning, Dude Perfect — a group of five brotherly YouTubers known for their viral trick shots and stunts — opened its upgraded headquarters in Frisco at Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’ Star Business Park. Across the way, bulldozers sat idly next to mounds of dirt, taking breathers from building yet another development in Frisco’s seemingly endless growth. After years of scouting locations for its buzzy new headquarters, Dude Perfect has decided to keep its roots in Frisco.
Dude Perfect was formed in 2009 by the namesake dudes — twins Cory Cotton and Coby Cotton from The Woodlands, Plano’s own Cody Jones and Prosper’s Tyler Toney and Garrett Hilbert — while they were students at Texas A&M.
In the nearly two decades since Dude Perfect’s formation, the guys have come far from their Aggie dorm rooms and their ramshackle early YouTube days: their first-ever video was uploaded to YouTube in April 2009. “Hello, folks, welcome to backyard stuntman,” said Toney, sitting on a lawn chair, decked out in an Aggie shirt and holding a basketball before going on to sink a series of no-look backyard shots — seated, behind the back, from the overside of the yard and from the roof. Then, after loading up the hoop in a car (and sinking shots driving down the street), he swished shots at a local park. Within days of their first upload, the video went viral online, racking up over 200,000 views, and it even received a plug on Good Morning America. And though it might’ve seemed like some buddies goofing off, this was the start of a multimillion-dollar sports content creation empire. The video, titled “Dude Perfect | Backyard Edition | Our First Video!” now has 45 million views.
The dudes’ appeal is easy to understand: their bro-ish, good-natured dynamic, paired with their clean and quick-witted humor, are key components in their action videos, which leave viewers on the edge of their seats to see how they pull off their wild and sometimes just plain silly stunts. They’re a group of friends who are really good at sports and don’t give up until they sink the most impossible of impossible shots.
In those early years, many of the group’s videos were filmed in Collin County — including a viral classic in which an anonymous person dressed as a panda bear gets hit in the stomach with a dodgeball inside the Plano Senior High School gym — the same gym the 6′6″ Jones graced with his presence on the varsity basketball team when he helped win the state championships. (The panda bear is now emblazoned on the wall of their new HQ.) The dudes went into full-time content creation, and in 2014, they opened their first headquarters in an old furniture shop on the main drag in downtown Frisco. Two years later, they opened DPHQ2 in a Frisco industrial park, which allowed space for the dudes’ bigger videos.
And bigger they got. Over the past 16 years, Dude Perfect has become a household name. The dudes have hung out with some of the biggest names in sports to create fun and hilarious content — including retired NFL quarterback Tom Brady, former Dallas Mavericks point guard Luka Dončić and Golden State Warriors point guard Stephen Curry. Even celebs outside of the sports world — like comedian Nate Bargatze, actor Jeff Goldblum and country singer Luke Bryan — have performed some crazy sporting stunts with the dudes.
While the outside of the new headquarters looks like a nondescript warehouse, the inside is where YouTube dreams are made. The new headquarters, which has been nicknamed DPHQ3, is awash in mint green; it spans 80,000 square feet and contains a full-size basketball court, a weight room, an indoor golf course, an indoor soccer field, a virtual golf course, a football field (with a regulation goal post) and a pickleball court. All that is missing is a baseball diamond.
The white walls of a stairwell leading to server rooms and editor labs are adorned with signatures and memorabilia from various athletes who have visited the building, including Olympic gold medalist and track star Noah Lyles and Dallas Cowboys wide receiver CeeDee Lamb.
With high ceilings, a full-service props department, greenscreen-compatible backdrops, a podcast studio and production offices, and a computer server room that looks like something out of the movie 2001, DPHQ3 looks like a film studio specifically designed for the age of content. It’s spacious enough for cameras to capture the action at every angle. And with 60.8 million YouTube subscribers and 20 Guinness World Records under their belts, the bros can crank out slick sports clips like never before.
To date, the dudes have won over millions of fans and broken several world records, including most thumbtacks inserted into a corkboard in a minute, most eggs crushed with the toes in 30 seconds, most drink cans opened with one hand in a minute and farthest distance traveled on Swiss balls (those giant inflatable exercise balls) — all of which they broke on their 2019 Nickelodeon show, The Dude Perfect Show. Their most recent record came in 2023, when they once again broke the record of the world’s highest basketball shot at 856 feet from the Strat Tower in Las Vegas. They set their original record in 2009 when they shot a basketball from the third deck at Kyle Field into a ground-level hoop.
But back in September 2022, it sounded like the dudes were leaving Frisco. As Local Profile reported at the time, the dudes had partnered with the San Antonio-based Overland Partners architecture firm to pitch a $100 million headquarters to various cities in 2022. But they always had their sights set on their home, North Texas. “A lot of what you see is us really just putting a physical form to something they’ve had a vision for, for the past several years,” said Bryan Trubey, senior principal at Overland Partners, during a 2022 presentation of the originally proposed DPHQ3.
In early reports, the dudes emphasized that they would love for the headquarters to remain in North Texas; however, several cities had expressed interest in having them set up shop — including Los Angeles and Atlanta. Mockups of the proposed new headquarters looked like a spacecraft from a James Cameron movie and imagined many of the previous offerings, as well as a food court, a merch shop and a 330-foot “impossible shot” tower, where fans could try to make an impossible basketball shot in a splash pool below.
Just as people from around the country — and the world — were flocking to Frisco, the dudes seemed like they were leaving. A year later, in December 2023, the scuttlebutt was that construction had started on the dudes’ new headquarters, but not in Los Angeles or Atlanta. In Frisco. The dudes were staying in Frisco, which is what they had really wanted all along.
“It’s so close for us,” says Toney. “It is our hometown city, and it’s just a great, sports-centric town. There are so many great sports organizations and teams close by, and youth sports are a huge part of the area, and so it just makes a lot of sense for us to be here.”
It does make sense. Frisco is a sports destination: it’s home to the world headquarters of the Dallas Cowboys, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, the PGA of America, the Dallas Stars, FC Dallas, the Frisco RoughRiders, the National Soccer Hall of Fame and the Dallas Open. And now — and still — Dude Perfect.
“Dude Perfect has been an incredible partner for the city of Frisco for many years,” says Frisco mayor Jeff Cheney. “To see them grow and expand right here in the city of Frisco from humble beginnings on Main Street to growing into a bigger facility and now continuing that vision to a bigger dream. They’re world-renowned superstars, so they bring a lot of attention to our city and our brand, and it aligns perfectly here in Sports City, USA.”
to their Frisco headquarters. Photo by Aric Becker
Dude Perfect has multigenerational fans — some of whom weren’t even born when the channel was launched. Now that the dudes are dads, they factor in how to make their content appeal to a variety of demographics.
“Content creation has taken on a new light,” says Coby Cotton. “We always think about, ‘Hey, what do we want to watch? Let’s make content that we want to watch.’ Now, we think not only ‘What do I want to watch as a dad?’ but ‘What would I want to watch with my kids? What do my friends and their kids want to watch together?’ It informs the decisions we’re making … and we always want to make our content awe-inspiring, and we want you to laugh while watching it.”
Last fall, Dude Perfect hired former NBA exec Andrew Yaffe as the brand’s CEO. According to Variety, the Stanford business grad’s hiring came after the dudes raised more than $100 million in growth capital from private investment. Before Yaffee took the CEO position, he had worked with the NBA in various capacities since 2016, including EVP, head of social, digital and original content, in which he led content strategy, development, production and publishing across the basketball league’s social and direct-to-consumer channels. At the helm of the Dude Perfect brand, Yaffe wants to continue the group’s legacy as the most trusted brand in family entertainment.
“I think the guys have done an amazing job building this [legacy],” says Yaffe, “and there is so much more we can do with that — other areas of content and new formats, new products and new experiences.” Some of these include a best-selling board game, live tours and collaborations with BodyArmor. At the time of our conversation, the group had wrapped its fifth live tour, which visited over 20 venues across the U.S., selling out 20,000 seats each. “I think it just really speaks to the quality when you have that connection with your audience, and you have that trust in your brand,” says Yaffe. “There are all sorts of new products and experiences that fit under that, which we’re going to be able to build over the future.”
As Dude Perfect has evolved, so has the social media landscape. At its inception, the group primarily shared on YouTube. Now, the group has optimized its content for various avenues, like TikTok, Instagram and Instagram Reels. Though much of the fan base still watches the videos on YouTube — notably, via their TVs, as opposed to their computers or smart devices — the group plans to maintain its outreach and appear on the screens of people from all walks of life.
“Something we’ve been super excited about within the last couple years is the Dude Perfect streaming service, and that’s on Apple TV and Roku,” says Cory Cotton. “It’s basically a free app, and if you are the type of family that wants to make sure that if you let your kids watch this, we have done the hard work for the parents, so that [they] don’t have to look over their kids’ shoulder every second and make sure that the ads in the videos are safe, because, again, we have kids, and we know what that’s like ourselves.”
Sixteen years ago, when they were creating their first video, the dudes never imagined they would evolve into a household name. Having begun as college kids, the group found instant fans in people both young and old, who live vicariously through the members as they perform tricks and stunts — and have fun while doing them. Now, as dads in their own right — with 17 kids between them — the group continues to build new generations of fans.
From setting up their first office in a furniture shop on Main Street in Frisco in 2014 to now residing in a multimillion-dollar headquarters, the members of Dude Perfect have come full circle at their home in North Texas. They’re still making impossible shots. They’re still the dudes. And they’re still in Frisco.
“To be able to be here close to home,” says Toney, “and be able to do what we do is pretty special.”
