Jim Boeheim hasn’t sent out a tweet in the month of November. Neither has Dino Babers, aside from an obligatory Veterans’ Day post with a graphic made by the SU football social media team. As popular as these coaches are — the billboards and TV commercials will show you they are quite popular in central New York — they are not Quentin Hillsman.

Hillsman, or “Coach Q” as his Syracuse (1-0) women’s basketball players call him, is instead a man of memes. He inundates the Twittersphere, sharing loads of news from SU Athletics and producing original material of his own. Just as you’ll rarely spot him on the sideline wearing something as standard as Boeheim’s usual blue coat-grey pants combo, you’ll seldom see a day go by where he isn’t active on Twitter.

“This new age, you guys don’t talk on the phone anymore,” Hillsman said. “You have to tweet and text and Instagram and all this.”

He’s right. Nearly a quarter of teens admit to going online “almost constantly,” according to a 2015 report released by the Pew Research Center. A whopping 92 percent of teens hop online at least once a day, the report said, adding that this mania of internet usage is possible because nearly three-quarters of teens own or have access to smartphones. In a world where those phones are becoming increasingly multidimensional, Hillsman is using his to connect with his players of the past, present and future.

Recruiting hatched Hillsman’s web presence. If the kids were using it, he figured he ought to as well. From there, it grew into a convenient way to stay in touch with players who have graduated and moved on.

“He knows what this generation is all about and he’s a part of it,” junior guard Abby Grant said.

Retweeting — essentially the reposting of another account’s original content — is not what sets Hillsman apart from the the likes of Boeheim and Babers. Rather, Hillsman also posts photos of himself and players captioned with large block lettering of an inspirational phrase.

They often end up on his Instagram account as well. In a sense, they’re memes.

Merriam-Webster has two definitions for “meme,” both being nouns. One is “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture,” while the other is “an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media.”

The latter definition surely applies to Hillsman’s practices, but the former does, too, because both Grant and redshirt junior guard Isis Young said they follow Hillsman on social media. They see his posts and are more motivated than amused because the messages of Hillsman’s memes are familiar. They’re the same lessons he preaches during practice.

“You just see (the memes) and you reinforce,” Young said. “Like, ‘OK coach likes toughness.’ But we know that.”

The content of these meme-lessons isn’t on a calculated schedule. It’s “random,” Hillsman said. Still, there are people who don’t even believe he’s tech-savvy enough to do any of this himself.

“They’re sleeping on my abilities here, right?” he joked last week.

But the people who do believe are the ones who matter the most. They’re the ones who run his plays and follow his rules. They’re the ones who came to Syracuse to play for @CoachQatSU.

Published on November 14, 2017 at 10:02 pm

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