If you, a sports-minded individual, were to open TikTok at this very moment, you would likely be greeted with hundreds of NBA and NFL-related “edits,” as they are known, a subgenre of fan-created highlight reels that serve to dramatize, hype up, or engender interest in a particular athlete or moment. The often young and creative minds behind these accounts (which boast follower counts in the thousands) typically employ cinematic transitions, trending sounds and songs, and hand-picked video clips to hit home the point of their bite-sized films, which strive to make you, the viewer, feel something before you inevitably scroll away.
Consider yourself a big fan of Kevin Durant? The hashtag #kevindurant boasts 389.2K TikTok posts as of this writing, a large portion of which function as thrilling and organically-created short films glazing the 16-time All-Star. Maybe LeBron’s more your speed, though, in which case a quick search under the hashtag #lebronedit or #lebronjamesedit will net you at least 30K posts to choose from (far more, though, if you opt for #lebron or #lebronjames). And if basketball isn’t so much your thing as much as football, never fear: #TomBrady has plenty of footage for Pats fans to drool over, a good chunk of which is packaged into the sports edit format we’ve come to view as typical: an unexpected intro, a flashy transition, and a rap or house song underpinning it all.
