Netflix’s latest foray into competitive reality television, The Circle, has a pretty fascinating cast of contestants, and Antonio DePina is no exception. He said very little about himself when he first came onto the show, but what he did say had us scratching our heads and wanting to know more. We knew he wasn’t a catfish, that he had a girlfriend back home but was willing to flirt to win (wait, what?), and that he is a professional basketball player.
Hold up. What is a professional basketball player doing trying to become The Circle’s most popular player? Since graduating college in 2017, DePina played for two international basketball teams, Electrico FC in Portugal and BC Martorell in Spain. Before joining the show, he traveled all over the world playing the sport. He also played in college while attending Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Currently, he appears to not be signed to a team, reports Distractify.
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DePina seems pretty passionate about the world of international basketball. In 2019, he launched an app called Overseas Basketball Connection that helps aspiring players connect with international teams. "As players we hire agents to find us jobs and we wait at home for our agents to call us when a team wants to sign us. That feeling of the unknown if our agent is actually working for us or putting us on the back burner can drive a player crazy!" he writes in a Kickstarter campaign for the project.
It is unclear whether he intends to join another team now that his time on The Circle is over.
Just like Love Island, The Circle is a British reality television show that originally became popular online before getting its own American version. In it, strangers move into an apartment and their only form of communication with each other is through an app called The Circle. Contestants can choose to either be a catfish or be themselves. DePina chose to play as himself. Each week, contestants rate each other from first to last and their average score help determines whether they stay on the show.
The players with the two highest scores are named “influencers,” and the rest of the players are at risk of being eliminated or “blocked.” Typically, it is the influencers who make the final decision on who to block which eliminates the player from the game. All of the contestants compete to become the most popular player and win $100,000. Unfortunately for him, DePina was eliminated, or “blocked,” by fellow influencers Chris Sapphire and Shubham Goel in the first four episodes of the series.
Even though DePina is no longer competing on The Circle, it appears as though he will have no shortage of things to occupy his time. On December 31, DePina shared a reflective post on Instagram looking back at some of his accomplishments from the past year. "I started 3 businesses, closed 15 real estate deals, recorded a Netflix TV show, created an app, made the most money I ever made in my life, and helped the most people I ever did!" he wrote.
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