Playing days over, Hahn still influencing basketball hopefuls
The legend of succession to Delaware’s girls basketball throne is a well-known story.
Before Elena Delle Donne became a WNBA star and Olympic gold medalist, she was already a local legend. So when, as a senior in high school, she saw Adrianna Hahn at a camp and invited the talented and enthusiastic fourth-grader on a limo ride to Washington to catch a Mystics game and introduced the starry-eyed Hahn to superstars she idolized, it amounted to an anointing of the next one.
“For a little girl to be in that space, it’s the biggest moment of your life,” Hahn said last week. “From then on out, I knew that I was in a good place.”
Both players’ trajectories would fulfill their prophecies in unique ways. Delle Donne became a superstar, a WNBA champion and icon for women’s sports. Hahn followed Delle Donne’s footsteps to Ursuline Academy in Wilmington as the heir apparent, named Delaware’s Miss Basketball and embarking on a recordsetting career at Villanova.
But it didn’t prevent Hahn from feeling lost after graduation last spring. She’d become the most prolific shooter in Big East history. But professional offers for a 5-foot-6 guard with chronically injured knees weren’t forthcoming. As the communications major pondered her next move, she took stock of her passions.
“It was a very challenging process,” Hahn said last week. “I still feel that I’ll always be stuck in the process of trying to figure out who I am now that I’m not a basketball player any more. And I did lose my identity a little bit after I left Villanova because I put so much value and work into being physically capable of playing basketball. So when I wasn’t able to do that, I was like, ‘what is my purpose?’ or moreso, ‘why would I tell little girls to go play basketball and have a dream and all this stuff, when at the end of the day, it’s just going to be done for you?’ I had this very negative space that I was in.”
Basketball, one of the pillars of her identity, became a cornerstone of what she wanted to build. The social media brand that Hahn cultivated was the means. And in merging them, she has launched a successful second career away from the court, as a female influencer for basketball and its culture online and as a skills coach in person for young boys and girls.
As a whole, Hahn hopes to be a model for young girls like her.
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The numbers are only so important to Hahn, but they tell a story. Hahn’s Instagram account has 112,000 followers. Only about a dozen women’s basketball players have accumulated as large of a following. They are names that even the casual fan would recognize, from Skylar Diggins-Smith
(1 million) to Delle Donne
(465,000) to Sue Bird and Maya Moore (392,000 and
245,000, respectively). Considering Hahn’s last basketball game was more than a year ago, in the second round of the Women’s
NIT, it’s all the more impressive. She didn’t have the biggest platform in college, even by the less-showcased standards of women’s hoops, with Villanova making the NCAA tournament her junior year to augment three WNIT appearances (and a semifinal run as a sophomore).
But her social media savvy has burst past those limits. Hahn grew the Instagram account in part by modelling in college, but she’s expanded her reach to include more than basketball-related glamour shots, opening doors for partnerships with brands and other influencers. She operates a TikTok account that mixes pop culture and serious basketball drills, earning 50,000 followers. She’s a frequent guest in online media, both audio and video, to share her advocacy for women in basketball. And she’s an early adopter of Cameo, a site that allows celebrities to offer customized fan experiences.
Hahn has also solidified a devout following by selling gear from her Villanova days to a fanbase that has surprised her with its receptiveness. Not just a source of post-graduation income, the experience reinforced the value of experimenting with new connections.
Part of Hahn’s appeal is the authenticity of the content. You get the sense that she’d be at the gym hoisting up 3-pointers anyway. Or that a drill where she’s dribbling two basketballs is somehow her natural habitat, whether or not there’s a TikTok filter and a pop song playing.
This isn’t the path she necessarily envisioned in elementary school. Soon after her audience with Delle Donne, the dream of playing professionally crystallized. It informed Hahn’s routines for years, from her dogged devotion in the gym to how she dressed away from it. She hinged her identity on basketball, one that got her bullied in middle school for being too boyish. She challenged herself by choosing a powerhouse high school program in Ursuline and branched out on the AAU circuit, first to the Philadelphia Belles, then to D.C. as part of Team Takeover.
It translated into a stellar career on the Main Line, with Hahn’s Steph Curryesque range. She set Villanova’s career record with
315 3-pointers at a 40.2 percent clip, is eighth in all-time scoring with 1,503 points and 19th in assists
(315). Hahn also set the Big East record for 3-pointers made in conference games
(169).
While coming from two relatively small communities — first Wilmington, then Villanova — may not have been the most conducive to exposure in terms of quantity, it taught Hahn something valuable about the quality of her interactions.
“Not just strictly from gaining those numbers and gaining a blue check (as a verified account), but it was more so how it articulated into the Villanova community and everywhere that I was going,” Hahn said. “I saw more and more little kids coming to games, wanting my autograph, wanting to talk to me. I saw more kids wanting me to get involved with their kids’ experience and teaching the fundamentals and almost being a role model in a sense. And that’s when it hit me.”
But when the college game ended, so did Hahn’s path on the court. She’d used her diminutive stature to fuel her competitive fire, but being 5-6 is a liability in the pros. Couple that with
surgically repaired knees that required constant icing by her senior year, and it became clear that a future in basketball would have to come off the court.
“I still feel like I could play,” she said, “but I just wouldn’t be able to walk the next day.”
Much of Hahn’s work now focuses on, as her brand name makes clear, working Outside the Huddle. She’s long lived at the intersection of sports and culture, and is trying to create a lifestyle brand that attracts athletes and non-athletes alike. It’s all in the service of a simple but vast goal: “I want to change the women’s game and open up more opportunities.”
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Hahn’s aspirations aren’t just digital. One offshoot is Hahn Hoops, which includes individual skills training and clinics. She envisions it extending to leagues and tournaments to create “a dynamic, East Coast presence.”
As Hahn sought to define the directions of her myriad ideas, she returned to her roots at Ursuline, serving as an assistant last season on the staff of John Noonan, who was her head coach.
The role wasn’t flashy, not often showcased on Instagram by Hahn. But connecting to players fed her desire in other ventures and helped sharpen her focus.
“She had an immediate impact,” Noonan said. “She’s got an incredible ability to share her wisdom but do it with a real gentle touch, but with an element of firmness. She would deliver her message in a way that it wasn’t coming from someone like me who would be a little more intense or a little more in your face. She would say it very slow, very methodically but still leave an exclamation point at the end of it.”
Hahn’s work ethic — “a little bit of an edge,” Noonan calls it — has translated into the hustle of business, where Hahn isn’t shy about knocking on (or down) doors with the energy and optimism of youth.
Part of that objective is to minimize the distractions in the online environment where she thrives. She admits that her laser focus on basketball dimmed at times in college, particularly as her focus on her digital life ramped up.
She also got her degree in three years and did a year of grad school, so it’s wasn’t all social media distractions.
Yet Hahn puts herself in the shoes of young girls now. If she had been 13 with a litany of distractions at her fingertips, would her focus have narrowed to the tunnel-visioned point of a ball rack and 3-point line? By colonizing the online space, maybe she can push kids off the phone.
When presented with the options of where she hopes to take her business, she replies with the entrepreneurial ambition of a 22-year-old. There’s no wobble in her voice when she says she can coach one day, nor when she offers that maybe she’ll be the first woman to coach in the NBA.
All the lines connect back to that first meeting with Delle Donne. Their paths since and their modes now have diverged, but Hahn’s goal is to do for others what was done for her.
“I wanted to be Elena Della Donne when I was her age,” Hahn said, remember her thoughts back in the day. “I wanted that responsibility and accountability of being a leader, and that’s something that I strived for. … I want to be just like her and do the same thing for someone else.”