Tacoma freshman college hooper turns Instagram laughs into millions of views
Conor Maguire finished filming his latest Instagram reel on the basketball court at the University of Puget Sound.
Within minutes, he had a good feeling. Sitting with a teammate and editing the reel inside Tacoma’s UPS Memorial Fieldhouse, the Loggers’ freshman men’s basketball player knew it was one of his better ideas.
Titled “POV: random low major white boy ruining your bracket every year,” the comedic video opens with a frame of Maguire drilling an off-balance 3-pointer over the outstretched arms of his defending teammate.
That’s essentially it: a series of Maguire knocking down 3-pointers in the 18 second clip. No dunks and certainly no alley-oops — just the cocky vibes of BYU’s Jimmer Fredette burying Gonzaga in the 2011 NCAA tournament with a lethal jumper.
The reel has over a million views. Not bad for a kid playing Division III hoops in Tacoma.
“We just knew this reel was gonna go crazy,” Maguire told The News Tribune during a break between classes on Tuesday. “Usually I can tell before it gets posted if it’s gonna do well or not.”
Maguire, who grew up and attended high school in San Francisco, has had several videos pass a million views, with a handful of others with several hundred thousand. He’s also on TikTok and YouTube, but Instagram has been his bread and butter.
He started creating content about a month before arriving at Puget Sound.
“I started making a couple skits,” he said. “I had maybe like 300 followers. When I got on campus, I started documenting my life, getting my teammates involved.”
His content strikes a balance between humor and his personal basketball development journey. He’s currently producing a series attempting to spend 1,000 hours practicing in under a year and has been documenting his training.
Those videos tend to bring in followers and build a loyal audience, Maguire said, while the comedic views have more “viral” potential.
“I’d say it’s a 50-50 mix of basketball humor and documenting my everyday life, what it looks like to get better at basketball,” he said.
Maguire currently has just under 20,000 Instagram followers. He’s hoping to keep that number growing. He’s been able to earn some money from the hobby, which is intriguing.
“I think I want to have some fun with it, then hopefully turn it into a career,” he said. “There’s so much money to be made in the content creation realm. There’s a real career there.”
Up first: a few more seasons with Aubrey Shelton’s Loggers. Maguire said Shelton and the UPS coaching staff have been supportive of his content creating. Maguire appeared in 18 games in his freshman season. His best game came at home against Willamette on Feb. 6, when he scored 16 points.
