#RunningManChallenge

About

The #RunningManChallenge is a dance fad in which college basketball players do a close-armed running man-style dance to the tune of the 1995 song “My Boo” by Ghost Town DJs.^[6] The fad became popular after the 2016 NCAA championships.

Origin

The first known #RunningManChallenge was posted to Instagram by user 11.oo7, who claimed that the video was inspired by another private user, Rah2bandz. The video, originally posted January 16th, 2016 received over 6,000 likes by April 20th.^[1] The following day, 11.oo7 posted “Part 2” of the #RunningManChallenge videos (shown in the YouTube compilation below), which received 5,300 likes.

Spread

The trend began to catch on through Instagam in the first few months of the year, eventually acquiring 2,922 posts with the hashtag by April 20th. On March 31st, 2016, the players Jared Nickens and Jaylen Brantley of the University of Maryland Terrapins posted a video to Instagram (excerpted below as a GIF) in which they perform a #RunningManChallenge. The video received over 3,100 likes as of April 20th, 2016.

After the original video was posted by Nickens and Brantley, The duo posted several more examples between April 12th and April 19th, including ones where they did the dance in a laundry cart, a convenience store, and the parking lot of a CVS. In the meantime, a player named Seth Allen from Virginia Tech (who used to play with University of Maryland) recorded a response video in which he was doing the same dance to the same song with a teammate. Posted on April 14th, it received over 560 likes in 5 days. The same day, several other players, including some with NCAA champions Villanova University also posted versions of the dance. (Compilation below.)

On April 20th, 2015, the sports publication SB Nation published a roundup of basketball player’s posts,^[2] incorrectly attributing the trend to Nickens and Brantley, an error that was then duplicated in a piece by the Washington Post.