Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, a former NBA star who played for the Charlotte Bobcats/Hornets and Dallas Mavericks throughout his nine-year NBA career, has had difficulties speaking for as long as he can remember.
For years, he was afraid to talk in class and got teased by other children. It wasn’t until middle school that Kidd-Gilchrist was diagnosed with stuttering and not until college that he started getting speech therapy.
Fear of having to speak publicly overshadowed otherwise joyous moments for Kidd-Gilchrist, such as winning the NCAA men’s basketball championship with the University of Kentucky in 2012 and being selected as the second pick in the 2012 NBA draft. But over time, “speech therapy helped me understand myself better and gain a lot of confidence and not care how other people view me,” he says.
In the summer of 2025, Kidd-Gilchrist and his startup, GreenLight Enterprises, Inc., kicked off a partnership with New York Institute of Technology’s [Entrepreneurship and Technology Innovation Center](https://www.nyit.edu/academics/engineering-and-computing-sciences/etic/) (ETIC) to develop a prototype of a technology platform that he hopes will help millions of children with stuttering get help faster than he did.
**This article originally appeared in the fall 2025/winter 2026 issue of** [**_New York Institute of Technology Magazine_**](https://magazine.nyit.edu/fall2025/)**.**
**_By Carina Storrs_**