The former five-star recruit and Duke guard is ‘unapologetically himself all the time’ whether in front of nearly three million social media followers or on one of college basketball’s biggest stages.
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.
McCain’s star was born, on and off the court, while he was a high school student at Centennial High School in Corona, California. His brother Jayce, 24, says Jared “flipped a switch” from a basketball perspective in eighth grade after seeing family friend Devin Askew emerge as a star on the high school recruiting circuit.
“It’s funny, when I first did it in , I wasn’t really processing it. Like, I knew it was a ‘girl’ thing, but I didn’t process it, to that extent, that people were going to be that mad at it,” McCain said during the NBA draft combine last month in Chicago. “I’m used to it by now, though.”As if being a Duke basketball player didn’t make McCain a villain enough for a segment of the internet, dancing on TikTok with painted nails added fuel to the fire.
“He’s great at balancing it, obviously. But the funny thing is, everything in his day is designed around him being the best basketball player he can be,” Jayce McCain, who spent last year as a graduate assistant at Duke, says. “He’ll do the influencer thing for five minutes, not even five minutes a day. He’ll just film a few TikToks in two minutes and that’s his work for the day for the influencer part, and the rest of the day is designed for him to be the best basketball player he can be.
He also emerged as the heartbeat of the Duke locker room, even on a team that featured multiple veterans like senior Jeremy Roach and sophomore star Kyle Filipowski.
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