Random College Athletes is the Twitter handle looking out for the rest of us
With 122,000 followers, the handle has given exposure to thousands of unknown college athletes – and their schools. We recently caught up with the creator, Nick Brown, to find out how it got started.
If we’re looking for another positive to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, know that it spawned the creation of one of the funniest Twitter handles you’ve probably never heard of.
Well, that last part is most likely not true — especially if you’re into college athletics, as Random College Athletes (@RandomAthletess), the Twitter handle created by Ohio-based software programmer Nick Brown has over 122,000 followers, as we speak.
Brown will tell you he was bored from all the sitting around during the pandemic lockdowns but what started off as a funny thing to share has morphed into a platform for college athletes who may never get notoriety because of their sport or their school. It’s been discussed on ESPN, Barstool Sports and even Stephen A. Smith made a note of just how unique Brown’s platform is.
Recently, we caught up with Brown to talk about the organic success of RCA, where he sees it going from here, and yo, what’s up with the lack of random Philly athletes!
Q: So how did Random College Athletes all come about? What spawned it?
A: Nick Brown: I don’t know if you’ve ever sat there with that group of friends and you’re like, ‘oh, do you remember, like this athlete or that played here?’ That’s about it. It realistically started off as me posting random athletes myself and it started that way for probably a month, and then it really started to gain traction. Larger accounts started retweeting and reposting. Then [ESPN analyst] Stephen A. Smith reacted to our tweet of him in like February [2021] and it just went wild.
Q: Has the allure for you changed now?
A: To me, it’s just a fun little side thing, but it’s so cool now that you get people that are excited about it. You get to see colleges and their athletes that I sometimes don’t think based on name would be real, that now you’re hearing about them for the first time. It’s cool to give that some love, but also the people that maybe they played one year, they’re still a college athlete and it’s cool to give regular people the spotlight. I don’t want to say 122,000 [followers] is a spotlight, but I guess in many ways, it is.
Q: So how does the page get fed with all of these athletes? Are you sourcing them? Is it mostly submissions?
A: Yeah, it was me [originally], but I would say that 99.9% of it is all [direct messages] now. Some people will send it in themselves. Some people will do it as a birthday joke. I’ve had schools send in people, I’ve had moms send in their kids. I’ll wake up some days and there are like 20-30 DMs of new athletes. The cool thing I think is that I’ve never followed anybody, I’ve never promoted it. It just kind of took off organically.
Q: OK, so we trolled the page and had to go pretty far down to find a Philly athlete. What’s up with that?
A: [Laughs], you know so much of our content is fed by colleges and universities in the Midwest, in fact, a lot of the Midwest. I mean we get some West Coast schools and then there are some randoms from like Canada, but not a lot from out that way. But it’s not a lack of love for the East Coast or Philly, we just don’t get a ton of submissions. And hey, hopefully, this [story] fixes that.
Q: Have you ever considered how far this could go? Would you even consider selling it off?
A: That’s a great question because I wrangle with the what do I want it to look like a year from now, two years from now question all the time. There are such different avenues [to] take. What if I just made merchandise? Like simple T-shirts. And then there’s more the riskier stuff, and I say, risky, not because it’s tangible stuff I could lose out on. It’s just taking away from time, personal, actual lifetime, work, and all that [ [I have] to do.
But I do know that it would be great to have a further connection to these athletes, and hear their stories. Is that a potential YouTube series? I don’t know, but there are options and that is something I never would’ve envisioned at this point two years ago [when we started].