Mid-major basketball programs and content creators have a lot in common.
They’re both constantly trying to generate interest, engage an audience and develop revenue streams in order to survive in their current state. Robert Morris is turning those commonalities into a partnership with content creator Cullen Honohan and his five-person team at All Hail Media.
The program reached out to Honohan, who lives in Pittsburgh, this offseason to produce content around the team, essentially giving him a mandate
to think outside the box. The result was an agreement to put All Hail’s logo on the RMU uniform in exchange for a dedicated content series.
Honohan says that RMU basketball will become the main focus of the All Hail YouTube channel – which boasts 372,000 subscribers – with around six episodes produced and released throughout the season. They will supplement it with short-form content on All Hail’s TikTok and Instagram pages, which have 1 million and 462,000 followers, respectively.
The first video, titled “I Rebuilt An Unknown College Basketball… (IN REAL LIFE)” is already out on YouTube. It introduces the team and lays the groundwork for the content plan.
“They’re like ‘we want to do something that nobody else has done before,” Honohan said of RMU’s pitch to him.
As a content creator, Honohan says that his ‘core’ is to tell positive basketball stories.
His content is primarily access-based. He posts all-access tours at top basketball prep schools and colleges, embarks on days in the life with top high school and college players, and more content of that ilk.
“We want to find the best stories in basketball,” Honohan told Mid-Major Madness. “Find the best athletes, the top talent, the underdog players, the kids that might not have it all yet, but with the right tweaks and the right storytelling platform, we can kind of get there.”
Much of All Hail’s top-performing content on YouTube centers around stories with inherently broad appeal. The top seven most-viewed videos feature two abnormally tall teenagers, Montverde Academy, Tyran Stokes, AJ Dybantsa, Harvard University and Allen High School – Texas’ largest public school.
“There’s been radical change to college sports in general over the last four to five years,” RMU head coach Andrew Toole said to USA Today. “How can we continue to adapt to the new landscape? I think content creators are part of that. It, I think, can help our players continue to become more attractive, and build a bigger brand and have a better experience.”
Robert Morris isn’t as catchy on a YouTube thumbnail. It’s a winning program, but it’s not a click machine by itself. Honohan knows that, and understands the risk involved, but can lean on some of his previous experience as well.
He said that for many of his videos, coaches and players will reach out to him asking him to find the story, and he’ll put together something interesting. With the amount of time he’ll be spending with Robert Morris, he’s confident he can find the story that will resonate.
“The more time you spend, every program has something unique going on,” he said. “Every program has something to offer, whether that’s a unique player, a unique journey, a Cinderella run, we’ll be there to find it.”
This also isn’t the first time that All Hail has made a series like this in the Pittsburgh area. Its most recent long-term project was a six-part series following ‘unknown’ high school player Luca Federico in an attempt to get him ranked by recruiting services, and offered by colleges. Federico eventually did attract high-major offers, but Honohan credits that to Federico’s development as a player more so than the content. Nevertheless, the YouTube series got over 1.2 million views.
Honohan also pushed locally to build Federico’s personal brand. All Hail put up 500 wanted posters in Pittsburgh telling people to follow his Instagram and pushed hard for local media attention. While he gained nearly 20,000 Instagram followers, All Hail fell short of the stated goal of getting Federico to 50,000.
“Show some of the interaction between players and coaches,” Toole said. “Show the experience that our players have in a way that they might not have been able to see before. And I think that can attract some of the right people, not only to our program, but then also to our university as a whole.”
With RMU, the local push becomes an even bigger focus, because much of his geographically scattered core audience won’t be able to have quite as much of an impact on the success of the series as a locally-centered one. So he has to change his approach.
“Kids that are scrolling on Instagram and on TikTok, they’re not going to be the same person that’s donating to a school or running a business here in Pittsburgh that might want to be an in-person sponsor in the arena this season,” Honohan said. “So, we’re definitely going to have to tweak it in a sense of there’s going to have to be different media that comes out about this. It’s not solely going to be reliant on our social media platforms, which will be new to us.”
All Hail is going to put up billboards in downtown Pittsburgh and put on events with local celebrities that will help make RMU “pop” locally.
And there’s already local impact and reach. Honohan says he was stopped at a coffee shop by an “older gentleman” who asked him about Robert Morris and the partnership.
“I (usually) never get asked about what I do from anybody over probably the age of 20,” Honohan said. “I’m excited to see how we can keep blending (the alumni base and older demographic in the city) into what we’re doing.”
Honohan is also leaning on All Hail’s connections, and his connections through his management at The Team. He says that “a few different companies” will be working with Robert Morris this season that haven’t previously because of the content.
And the core content, he hopes, will push people towards the program both locally and nationally.
“The stories aren’t just going to be (vlogging with the team),” Honohan said. “The stories are essentially about how we can turn people in the city into long-term RMU fans.”
