The Next Phase of Golf's Online Takeover Is Having a Moment on TikTok

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.

Kevin Durant plays basketball today here’s a goated edit for your timeline 🐐🚀#AllFire pic.twitter.com/XxhcNjIKLb
— 𝘚𝘵𝘶𝘯𝘯𝘢☆ (@Stunna999_) October 27, 2025

In today’s day and age, the popularity of these clips is nothing new; multiple publications have written in recent years about how fan edits are the manner in which Gen Z is choosing to engage with sports content, particularly as it relates to the NFL and the NBA.

Now, however? That subculture has come for golf, too.

Despite stereotypes as a stuffy, old man’s game, golf has seen a stark increase in popularity over the last six years, a boon fueled in large part by the sport’s inherent benefits (outdoors, socially distanced) during the COVID-19 pandemic. It has also enjoyed a fierce rise online, where young, professional stars like Bryson DeChambeau and amateur YouTubers like Bob Does Sports have racked up millions of followers on their respective social channels. Golf simulators like Topgolf and Five Iron have contributed to the influx of newbies, as well, especially among the 18-34-year-old demographic (members of which also happen to be much more likely to use TikTok in the first place).

That in mind, it's only fitting that the next stage of this cycle would manifest itself in the app's deep-seated culture of fancams.

According to three popular TikTok creators who spoke with Sports Illustrated, the amount of golf edits on the social media app has noticeably increased over the last six to 12 months, a jump that seems impossible to separate from the sport’s continued growth and its ongoing “main character moment” in the zeitgeist, as Big Swing Media characterized it in a July column.

Similar to basketball and football, the majority of these golf edits function as high-energy highlight reels for the game’s brightest stars: people like Tiger Woods, about whom the public loves to reminisce, and Scottie Scheffler, the best player of the current era.

“It was there before I started making videos, but not on the scale it is now,” Graham Sanger, the 18-year-old behind the golf edit account @Druptz, told SI of the golf edits scene. “ I think definitely in the past six months, it's reached a new level with all these new creators. … Like a year ago when I started, there was maybe, like, three or four big ones that I could name. Not even.”

Now, “there's at least, like, 30 [creators] in this Discord server that are all trying to do the same thing.”

Sanger, who started his account for fun, initially started posting edits in 2023, when he was focused more on the “popular sports,” like football, basketball, and soccer. But it wasn’t until he started playing golf himself around 2024 that he decided to change things up.

“For some reason, I was met with such a more welcoming audience of views and comments and likes, as opposed to when I was posting football videos,” he said. “So I posted another golf video, and then it was another golf video, and then all of a sudden, I was building a following around golf videos instead of everything else.”

It was a similar beginning for Benjamin Daloisio, who runs the popular account @SpiethTok (bonus points if you can guess his favorite pro). Only a few years ago, the 19-year-old SMU student started to see golf edits populate his feed. And after a while, he figured he would just dive in himself.

“I thought, post a couple, see what happens,” he explained of his motivation. “And it just picked up a ton of steam, and I've grown it to almost 20,000 followers. I've had a couple videos over a couple million views.”

These kids on SpiethTok just simply don’t miss https://t.co/qtOOPw6Oac pic.twitter.com/hoAIg3KnXR
— Perry "Chip" Maxwell (@ChipJohnson01) August 4, 2026

Again, Daloisio emphasized that the golf edits scene isn’t new, per se—it’s fair to say that certain users have been doing this for years—but the boom in popularity in recent months is nonetheless undeniable.

“There's a bunch of guys that have been there for a while and have been making videos for a while, but there are a ton of new accounts really picking up steam. … This past summer I would say it's really gotten big.”

It isn’t just “guys” getting in on the fun, though. Avtarnika Sharma, a London-based 26-year-old who operates under the handle @golf_brat, has been building herself a following with videos that employ the so-called “brat” style of editing, an Arial-heavy format popularized during the height of Charli XCX’s 2024 album cycle. Rather than choosing the typical rap or R&B song to score her masterpieces, Sharma instead utilizes pop music, pulling tracks from artists like Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, and yes, Charli XCX to capitalize on a small but mighty overlap between golf fans and Top 40 listeners.

“I just love pop music. I'm not even ashamed to admit it,” said Sharma, who at one point described an edit to One Direction’s “No Control” as her “magnum opus.” “I know people like to say they've got indie favorites and they listen to different genres…I just love straight pop. Whatever's on Billboard Hot 100.”

Whereas other editors might be trying to hype up a golfer’s prowess, or maybe play into the nostalgia for a bygone era, Sharma prefers to tell a story with her creations, toiling with already existing narratives to come up with new ideas. Some of her most successful posts, for instance, are those featuring frenemies Bryson DeChambeau and Rory McIlroy, whom she positions not just as rivals, but almost as jealous exes—Heated Rivalry-style.

rory mcilroy x bryson dechambeau - sympathy is a knife 🔪 pic.twitter.com/8tKOO7cRfa
— golf brat (@golf_brat) July 17, 2026

Sharma herself is a massive golf fan—Viktor Hovland is her favorite (she runs an X account dedicated to him, specifically)—but she has noticed that her style of editing, which employs a distinctly more feminine approach, is drawing interest from non-golf-watching female users in particular. Often, she gets comments under her clips, usually from woman-owned accounts, to the tune of: “Do I need to start watching golf now?”

“I would say it's still pretty much a male-dominated space,” Sharma said of TikTok’s golf community. “But what's surprising is that [my] account still does well, even if there aren't as many women who watch golf.

“I think the videos are reaching … people who just watch golf in general. And I guess a lot of people are okay with these type of edits. Again, it's the novelty factor that literally no one else in the golf edit space is doing this.”

The process of building the edit is relatively simple, if not slightly time-consuming, and each creator has a different method to his or her madness. Sharma, for instance, often gets ideas from song lyrics themselves and reverse-engineers the final product from that. And unlike Daloisio and Sanger, who download most of their footage from YouTube, she pulls her highlights from the U.K's Sky Sports, which boasts a treasure trove of content from every tournament.

“I just do it all on my phone,” Sanger, the mind behind @Druptz, explained. He uses CapCut as his primary editing software, and “usually it doesn't take me more than, like, two hours, but I've had videos that have taken me multiple days before, so it's a lot of screen time.”

If that sounds a bit isolating, well, it's really not. All three creators spoke warmly about the community at the center of this creative venture, many members of which talk frequently in the aforementioned Discord server, offering feedback, editing advice or help with sourcing clips.

"I would say the coolest part is the fact that people collaborate a lot. It's kind of like friendly competition in a way because everybody wants to get the big video and everybody wants to be better than the other person, but it's all, like, good fun, you know what I mean?" mused Daloisio, the owner of @SpiethTok.

"[E]verybody's trying to help each other."

You don’t need an MBA to recognize the opportunity here for the PGA. If a large swath of golf’s young fans live online, why not embrace this growing subculture and meet them where they are, in hopes of fostering interest in Tour events? Sadly, however, that hasn’t been the case—at least not yet. Sharma, for one, actually lost her original TikTok account following multiple copyright strikes from the league. And Sanger has had it happen, too.

“I'm just trying to promote the golf, like, I'm trying to promote your tournament and have more people watch it,” he lamented. “I had a video with over a million views get totally totally wiped and I was pissed and I didn't know what to do.”

(Sports Illustrated reached out to the PGA for comment, but did not hear back before publication.)

Such strict oversight becomes even sillier when you consider how all three creators are doing this primarily for the love of the game. Sure, there is some money to be made—TikTok’s creator fund offers payouts for accounts over 10,000 followers—but that’s not the driving motivation behind the work.

“There are follower goals, like, it'd be cool to hit like 25,000 followers and stuff like that, but honestly, I’m just having fun with it,” Daloisio explained. “I don’t necessarily have an end goal. It’s not like I’m trying to … make a certain amount of money or something like that. I’m just honestly having fun with it.”

Sanger, meanwhile, expressed interest in one day collaborating with or even working for the Tour, if they’d have him. And Sharma has already joined forces with the LPGA, for whom she compiled a few hype videos around the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship.

“So my dream for this account is, not just the LPGA but even the PGA tour, like, the guys who run the actual event marketing … some of the tournaments, they get in touch and they're like, ‘Can you create some hype around this tournament?’” she tells me.

The answer, of course, is that with CapCut, a smartphone and a good pop song, anything is possible.

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