From the day Jared McCain stepped on campus at Duke last summer, Blue Devils men’s basketball coach Jon Scheyer had “the TikTok talk” ready to go.
It’s something that came with the territory of recruiting the California native, equal parts basketball and social media star. Being a five-star recruit on the court, with nearly three million TikTok followers off of it, was guaranteed to create the question: ?So Scheyer, in his second year as Duke’s coach, was ready with what he called the “be careful on TikTok” speech, should McCain hit a bump in the road. It never came.
“It was literally never a distraction,” Scheyer says. “Once you’re around him, you realize he’s one of the few, maybe ever, to be able to handle both [basketball and social media] and still be all the way into everything that it takes to be a successful basketball player.”
The stereotypes associated with McCain, the 20-year-old future first-round NBA draft pick who embraces painting his nails and isn’t afraid to sing or dance in front of millions online, can be ugly. But how the 2024 draft prospect has played on the floor has won over plenty of skeptics, and in the process has helped redefine what “being yourself” looks like for athletes everywhere.