• Source: Adrien Nunez

      • Adrien Nunez (born May 14, 1999) or Adrien Nuñez is an American social media influencer, singer-songwriter, and former NCAA Division I college basketball player. He was not highly regarded as a high school basketball player at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Fort Greene, Brooklyn but he excelled during a postgraduate year garnering many scholarship offers and earning accolades at St. Thomas More School in Oakdale, Connecticut. He was part of a highly rated entering class his 2018–19 freshman year for the Michigan Wolverines men's basketball team of the Big Ten Conference. Nunez was a student athlete with offers to play basketball at multiple Ivy League schools and he earned three consecutive Academic All-Big Ten recognitions. Michigan went to the Sweet Sixteen round of the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament all three of the seasons he played which were not impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
      Despite his limited role on the basketball court, he became the team's most popular social media creator during the COVID-19 pandemic. The June 2021 Supreme Court National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston ruling prior to his senior season which made student athlete compensation permissible thrust Nunez into prominence with many high-profile corporate sponsors and partners making him one of the highest paid college athletes. After graduating, he began promoting other country music musicians through his social media platform to his millions of followers and then released his own music. Within three months of his new music release, Billboard announced he was signed to the Warner Music Nashville and Warner Records music labels.


      Youth


      Nunez was born to Jenny Lessard and Martin Nunez in Manhattan, New York. Martin owns a food market chain. As a youth, Adrien was a skateboarder, snowboarder, and video gamer before picking up a basketball in seventh grade when his father encouraged him to fit playing basketball into his schedule alongside his time expenditure on video games. He played on his middle school basketball team and then attended Millennium High School in Lower Manhattan for his freshman year, where he played a year of basketball before transferring to Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School. He played junior varsity basketball there as a sophomore. Nunez was a reserve for Bishop Loughlin varsity basketball as a junior and senior. At Bishop Loughlin, he averaged 4.8 points per game in the primary role of screener and undersized big man on a 2017 New York Catholic High School Athletic Association semifinalist team led by Keith Williams and Markquis Nowell who had also played for Bishop Loughlin. Nunez only had a NCAA Division II basketball scholarship offer from Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts upon graduation. Nunez did have strong interest from future Michigan assistant coach Phil Martelli to play for him at Saint Joseph's in Philadelphia. However, he decided to study for a postgraduate year at St. Thomas More Prep in Connecticut.
      Hard work and the chance to demonstrate his outside shooting on the AAU circuit earned him Division I mid-major offers from Fordham in the The Bronx, New York and Bowling Green in Bowling Green, Ohio. Soon, more offers came in, including Atlantic 10 Conference schools VCU in Richmond, Virginia and Saint Joseph's. Penn State was his first high major offer. By the time Michigan entered the fray, Texas A&M in College Station, Texas and Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts had already given him offers. In addition Nunez had multiple offers from Ivy League basketball programs. He committed to Michigan in early October 2017 following his official visit to Ann Arbor. At St. Thomas More, he averaged 15.5 points per game and 5 rebounds, earning 2018 All-NEPSAC AAA first team honors. He finished his high school career ranked as the 305th best basketball athlete and 62nd best shooting guard in the national class of 2018 per 247Sports' composite rating.


      College basketball



      Nunez and his family lived in Brooklyn. He visited Michigan on September 29, 2017, gave a verbal commitment on October 2, and signed a National Letter of Intent on November 10. He joined a Michigan's 2018 class which included Ignas Brazdeikis, David DeJulius, Colin Castleton, and Brandon Johns. It was ranked among the top ten incoming classes in college basketball. At 6 ft 5 in (1.96 m), 175 pounds (79 kg), Nunez committed to join the 2018–19 Michigan Wolverines who were at the time he signed the defending 2017 Big Ten men's basketball tournament champions. When he joined the team, they were defending 2018 Big Ten men's basketball tournament champions and the defending 2018 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament runner-up.
      Nunez played for Michigan from 2018–2022 and helped the 2020–21 Wolverines earn the 2020–21 Big Ten Conference men's basketball season championship and helped Michigan reach its third, fourth and fifth consecutive NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament sweet sixteen. Meanwhile, Nunez earned individual honors as a student athlete with three consecutive Big Ten Conference All-Academic recognitions. As a freshman, he played in 20 games and only scored 3 points, but with the departure of Jordan Poole, Brazdeikis, and Charles Matthews as well as a coaching change from John Beilein to Juwan Howard, Nunez had an opportunity for a more prominent role as a sophomore. When Franz Wagner was out of the 2019–20 Wolverines' lineup for four games, Nunez started in his place, scoring a career high 8 points on November 22, 2019, against Houston Baptist College from Houston. After Wagner returned to the lineup, Nunez struggled with his shooting and his defense, resulting in a limited role.
      After his sophomore season, he switched from jersey number 5 to number 0 (which DeJulius had been wearing) to make way for incoming freshman Terrance Williams to wear number 5. After playing just 7.9 minutes per game as a sophomore, Nunez surprised many by deciding to stay rather than enter the NCAA transfer portal. However, Nunez said that the only time during his career that he contemplated transferring to another school which might have offered a more prominent role on the court was immediately following coach Beilein's surprise spring 2019 departure. This was even though every offseason his former AAU coach was being inundated with inquiries about Nunez's interest. Instead, Nunez sought out a role on the scout team during his final two seasons. Coach Howard's technique of helping upgrade Nunez' defensive deficiencies by forcing him to repeat drills until he got it right was something which Nunez appreciated.


      Social media



      Despite his limited role on the court, Nunez became the teams most followed player on TikTok and Instagram after posting his first TikTok video on January 13, 2020, and becoming active on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic. By May 2020, he had over 40 thousand TikTok followers. After the Supreme Court of the United States ruling in the 2021 National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston case, student athlete compensation, such as payment for name, image, and likeness (NIL), became allowable for NCAA scholarship athletes beginning on July 1, 2021. Within months, he became the highest earning player on his team despite having never played more than four minutes in a game the prior season and having limited prospects for playing time behind Eli Brooks, Caleb Houstan, Kobe Bufkin, Zeb Jackson, and Terrance Williams.
      As a senior for the 2021–22 NCAA Division I men's basketball season, he became one of the highest earning NIL players in the country earning more than some NBA draft lottery picks, although he played less than 5 minutes per game as a senior and averaged less than a point per game for his career (61 points in 62 games). He had a multi-million follower fan base on TikTok as a senior. For several months, he navigated the NIL marketplace on his own before hiring an agent. His senior season sponsors and partners included Celsius, CashApp, SoFi, Spotify, Coach, Amazon, Coca-Cola, and Pizza Hut. After graduating he began promoting country music artists including Shaboozey, Graham Barham, and Avery Anna. When "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" was RIAA certified platinum, Shaboozey's label credited him giving him a platinum plaque. The song had a record setting run on the Billboard Hot 100 and surpassed Carrie Underwood's "Jesus, Take the Wheel" and "Old Town Road" by Lil Nas X featuring Billy Ray Cyrus for chart performances.


      Music


      On August 29, 2024, Nunez released his debut "Low Road". By 2024, Nunez had moved from Los Angeles to Nashville. He made his stage debut on September 25 in Nashville two days before releasing a collaborative version of "Low Road" with Avery Anna. In October 2024, Nunez released "Minnesota". He was added to the C2C: Country to Country music festival lineup in the same month. By October, he also announced that he would tour with Dasha in November 2024 and Avery Anna in December 2024. In late November 2024, Nunez signed to Warner Music Nashville and Warner Records. The signing followed the viral success of "Low Road". He achieved 50 million views and 5 million streams in his first days as a creative artist as well as hundreds of thousands of new TikTok followers. He claims that the 5 million streams was the Spotify total alone (a claim republished by Sports Illustrated) and that across all platforms the total was 10 million. Nunez's major label debut song, "Apology Song", was released with the announcement of his signing.


      Notes




      External links


      Nunez at Warner Music Nashville
      Nunez bio at MGoBlue.com
      stats at Sports Reference

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