MASON, Ohio — The opportunity to meet Bengals receiver Ja’Marr Chase became the perfect bait for two local content creators, but their prank on Kings Island’s opening day weekend left some calling foul.
"I knew my intent and I knew my intent wasn't to do any harm," said Dale Adams, who runs the account Prodigy Sports.
The online media creator pushed that Chase was going to make an appearance on the first Saturday that Kings Island opened. Ultimately, some fans not only fell for it but even had their Bengals jerseys autographed by the prankster.
"I did, you know, empathize with the family and the kid, but at the same time, I don't think it should be that much pushback on me," said Adams.
The pushback he's seen ranges from racially insensitive messages to calls for the arrest of him and his cousin, Reece Schmidt, who was in the video with him.
"We thought it was really funny. So then we hurried up, and we got our reaction video up on Prodigy Sports," Schmidt said. "We saw a lot of reactions were happening, 1,000 likes on Facebook. That video we posted ended up getting 600,000 views."
And growing. But also growing were the comments on Facebook and TikTok.
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"I mean, this was like an innocent situation compared to what happened later on at Kings Island that night, which was more surprising for us that that didn't get a huge share,” Cherisse Adams, step-mother to Reece Schmidt and step-aunt to Dale Adams, said referring to news that a 17-year-old was found to be in possession of a weapon outside the park.
Cherisse Adams and her husband Derrick said the two young creators bring them content ideas all the time and they will advise if something steps out of the box. They didn’t see anything wrong with the "Dollar Tree Ja’Marr" prank and said more people need to be focusing on not only the incident that night, but the issue of youth violence in our community.
"I think it's a tricky topic that people don't really want to talk about. Sometimes we don't want to talk about things you don't," said Derrick Adams. "Just getting a platform where we can, like have open discussion about what these real issues are, that should be a real concern in our city."
The couple operates 93 Ways 2 Mentor, focused on serving adolescents in the Tri-State. Their website says their mission is to provide youth with guidance, support and encouragement to make positive decisions that lead to a successful future.
In addition, Cherisse Adams works as a social worker at a local school and with Children’s Hospital working to solve the connective issues that make up the bigger picture.
"The goal is to bring parents at a table to teach them about their untreated traumas, to give them resources to help them deal with things so they can in turn, help their kids be able to be successful," Cherisse Adams said.
Another video posted after the prank showed both creators talking about Kings Island banning them for a year.
"That was a prank on the Facebook ladies, actually, and (the) thousands of comments saying, 'You deserved it.' All of this, they all think we're banned and it's honestly hilarious," Adams said.
While they're not banned, Kings Island communications director Chad Showalter said in an email, "We don’t condone this type of behavior by guests, but there’s no other information that we can share at this time."
As for the two creators, the prank only helped with their page. Creating content is how they’re making money, and they now have more than 28,000 followers on TikTok and 1.46 million followers on YouTube.
They’ve capitalized off the prank and will continue making content.
Cherisse and Derrick Adams said they just hope one day the discussions tied to youth violence get as many people talking as the fake Chase post did.
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