CORONA — It seems incongruous. Corona Centennial High’s Jared McCain is known as much for his social media aptitude and his personality as for his basketball skills, maybe even more so.
He’s a 6-foot-3 junior guard who had a breakout performance at last summer’s Peach Jam grassroots tournament and put himself on a lot of five-star recruiting lists. He’s been courted by Duke, Gonzaga, UCLA, Houston and Kansas, among others. Yet those who follow his 30-1 Centennial team – which opens SoCal Regional Open Division play at home on Saturday night against Bishop Montgomery – or pay attention to his page on recruiting websites are dwarfed by his social media following.
McCain’s TikTok dancing videos had nearly 986,000 followers as of Friday afternoon. He has 227,000 followers on Instagram and 36,400 followers on his YouTube channel with girlfriend Sydney Williams. And he is the centerpiece of a YouTube docuseries, “Believe,” that has attracted 2.4 million views over its 10 segments thus far.
He is considered maybe the most marketable prep basketball player in the country by at least one observer – yes, even more so than Bronny James – and that should be a huge advantage in the name/image/likeness era. So by extension, he has to be a diva, right? A “me” guy. The type of guy who strains a team’s culture.
Not at all. And this anecdote helps explain why.
“We do a two-line defensive slide drill,” Centennial coach Josh Giles said. “There’s no ball. Slide to the sideline, sprint to the midline, side to side, and you zig-zag up and down the floor. It’s just working on fundamentals, footwork, slides, right? And for us, we’re always big on … if there’s a loose ball, we’re first to the floor. During a game, if there’s a loose ball our entire bench, coaches, players, will scream ‘floor!’
“Well, he does the drill. This was maybe about three or four weeks ago. He does the drill, finishes, screams ‘floor.’ He sprints to the 3-point line and sells out, dives on an imaginary loose ball. How many five-star recruits, how many players, in general, are going to do that?”
No, Jared McCain is not a guy who is too cool for the locker room. He casually dropped into our conversation this week the fact that he meditates daily – “focusing on my main goal,” he said – and has been doing yoga since his freshman year.
“I have really tight hips,” he said. “That’s always been a bit thing for me to get a little more loose, a little flexible like that.”
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar did yoga, too. McCain is in good company.
For an 18-year-old high school player with so much potential swirling around him, he seems well-grounded. Parents Gina and Lance have instilled the right values by all accounts, and older brother Jayce – a redshirt sophomore at Division II Cal State San Marcos – lit a spark that didn’t take right away but turned into an inferno.
“When he was in high school I wasn’t even into basketball like that,” Jared said. “He’d ask me to rebound, and I wanted to play Fortnite. So it’s kind of like I’m (now) trying to repay him. I’m so glad to take him on (college) visits and do stuff that he didn’t get to do in his high school career. Because, you know, not that it’s all me, but I feel like I could have helped him just rebounding for him. But now he does it all for me, and you know, I’m very lucky to have him.”
Maybe it helps that McCain is one of many stars on a team that has won back-to-back CIF-SS Open Division titles. Senior Donovan Dent and junior forwards Aaron McBride and Devin Williams are also returning starters from last spring’s championship team, which played the title game on June 11 because of the pandemic-delayed schedule and then opted out of regional play so players could participate in the Section 7 recruiting showcase in Arizona.
It was McCain’s three second-half 3-pointers that helped turn the momentum in last Friday’s 68-48 CIF-SS Open Division final victory over Harvard-Westlake. But in our conversation this week he recalled a night last season when the bus pulled back onto campus from a road game and he asked Giles if the coach could open the gym so he could get some more shots up, so frustrated was he at his play.
“My brother came in, my dad came in there and was rebounding for me,” he said. “And after that, I just broke down crying in front of them. I was just like, ‘I just don’t get why I’m working so hard and nothing’s coming.’”
The lesson he took from that: “No matter what happens, everything will come into what you want it to be if you just stay true to yourself and keep working.”
One other thing McCain said that resonated: “Once you hit college, it’s really a business. And even now with the NIL stuff, almost high school is a business at some point.”
This has been a fact for years. And it’s good that athletes previously shackled by an outdated amateurism model are now able to reap some of the benefits. McCain is already monetizing his status to some degree – he has a T-shirt page on Etsy – and Jordon Rooney of the Jaster Creative marketing firm in Pittsburgh believes his potential is far greater.
Bronny getting an NIL deal makes sense.
But, the most marketable high school athlete in the US is Jared Mccain.
He has an engaged audience, unique personality & understands content creation.
Brands should try to do a deal with him ASAP before the price goes up. @J_mccain_24 pic.twitter.com/jkPq7rbZB0
— Jordon Rooney (@jordonr) February 25, 2022
Rooney said athletes who sign name/image/likeness deals often “don’t have an engaged audience. People follow them because they’re athletes, because they’re a fan of them on the court. But in order to be a valuable brand partner to be sponsored by a brand, your audience needs to value you off the court because you need to be able to sway their buying decision.
“Jared’s personality, his following, has come more so from him off the court. His on-the-court prowess, his talent on the court has provided an entry point so people know who he is, but their connection to him is as a person.”
When McCain came off the court after last week’s championship game, he was mobbed by his fans/followers. That should have been a sign right there.
@Jim_Alexander on Twitter