A countless number of people across the nation must have heard about the “Running Man Challenge” phenomenon that two UMD basketball players made go viral. Jared Nickens and Jaylyn Brantley were recently featured on the Ellen show in order to give her information about the dance craze and show her how it was properly done.

Although Brantley and Nickens were the ones to make the dance craze go viral, they were actually not the ones who started the running man dance challenge. Along with the basketball players, the creators, Kevin Vincent and Jeremiah Hall from Hillside, New Jersey, were also featured on the show. They told Ellen how the young men played the “My Boo” song and started dancing to the song. Their classmates watched and videotaped them dancing to the tune. After a while, this dance was spread throughout the nation with numerous other people, companies and more posting videos responding to the running man challenge in which they did running man dance themselves.

During the Ellen show, Vincent and Hall received a check from Shutterfly for $10,000 that they can use towards paying for their college education. Both Nickens and Brantley received boxers from Ellen with their last names printed on the back to wear on game days. Towards the end of the show, all four men did the running man dance for the cameras. Nickens and Brantley decided to be creative with the dance. During the dance, Brantley pretended to lay flat on the floor while Nickens pretended to resuscitate him by pushing on Brantley’s chest with Nickens’s hands.

While Vincent and Hall explained that they did not know that both Nickens and Brantley would post videos of them participating in the running man challenge, they have become overjoyed at this fact. Ellen had showed a video of one of these two men at the beginning of the show where he pleaded to Ellen to put him on the show so that he can exhibit the running man dance that was going viral. Without Nickens and Brantley along with these two men, this running man challenge would not have grown into the huge phenomenon that it is today.

While the running man challenge has been enormously successful throughout the nation, the running man is not the end for Nickens and Brantley. They have said to the media how they are planning more surprises for the public involving another dance. We do not know yet what their plans are, but we do know that it will become as popular as the running man is today. To watch the two men on Ellen, you can visit this link http://ellentube.com/videos/0-omo6czbk/.