USD soccer’s Joana Zanin claims Tik Tok fame

Joana Zanin, a sophomore forward for the Women’s Soccer Team, has gone viral on ESPN, Twitter, and now, Tik Tok.

In 2018, Zanin hooked a soccer ball into the upper right corner of the net to tie UMKC, making SportsCenter’s No. 1 spot on its top ten plays. Following her ESPN stardom, Zanin posted a video over the summer to her Tik Tok app, which now has 2.4M likes with over 28.5M views.

In her viral video, Zanin slaps her friend, sophomore forward Tiannah Moore, to the sound of “Clap Your Hands,” hitting almost every beat.

“At first I didn’t really believe it,” Zanin said. “I saw that I was getting so many likes and thought this was just little kids following me, but then someone on my team said that their cousin in Cleveland sent it to them asking if I was on their team.”

“So for that video,” said Zanin’s roommate Taylor Cotter, “I was actually in the other room and I was making fun of them for doing it and was like ‘you guys are dumb.'”

Cotter found out how viral the video actually from friends on the west coast, she said.

“I’m from California, and I had friends back home send it to me and be like ‘aren’t these your roommates?'” Cotter said. “And I was like ‘yeah, I know they’re weird.’ It’s crazy.”

The video didn’t just reach friends, it also reached Chantel Everett from TLC’s 90 Day Fiancé.

“My older sister was like ‘You know Chantel, my favorite character? Dude look, she posted your video on her page,'” Zanin said.

When making her videos, Zanin said she doesn’t always follow the Tik Tok norm.

“I think there are some girls that go on and they get all ‘cuted’ up and say, ‘okay, we’re gonna look hot in this so we can get all our likes.’ But my process is, like, I just want them to be funny,” Zanin said. “Before a soccer game, we’re all sweaty and stuff just messing around.”

As of Oct. 15, Zanin has 234.1K followers on her Tik Tok account. She followed the best tiktok marketing strategy to get more followers.

“I feel like if my motivation to make these Tik Toks was to get followers, it would get addicting,” Zanin said. “I just do it because I’ve danced for my whole life. It was always soccer and dance. So doing this kinda brings out my dance.”

A video Zanin posted to her Twitter account in Febraury gained more than 10M views.

This video featured Joana’s mother, Elizabeth, dancing behind one of her 93-year old clients at Anytime Fitness in Pierre and was uploaded by Zanin in the same year that she made SportsCenter’s Top Ten.

“My mom trains this older woman and it’s a video of the women dancing at the gym,” Zanin said.

When asked whether Joana would start a Youtube channel, “I would, but I just feel like I’m not tech-savvy.”