LiVe TikToks of people playing basketball are weirdly hypnotizing
Watching basketball isn't weird — there are millions of fans out there. And enjoying basketball online certainly isn't weird — there's a whole subset of Twitter obsessed with the NBA.
But watching basketball live on TikTok? It's kind of a strange hobby. And yet, I often find myself practically hypnotized by live basketball on my For You Page (FYP).
It started, as far as I can tell, with an account called the @the6ixshooter. Who can truly remember when or how a TikTok rabbit hole begins — that damn addictive, mind-numbing algorithm — but I specifically remember watching this dude shoot and make shot after shot after shot after shot...
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I was just sitting there staring, entranced. The guy, who I now know is named Seth McCoy, was getting fed basketballs by an automatic rebounder. It's a machine that catches basketballs under the hoop and shoots them back out to the person shooting. And McCoy would sink every single shot. I watched for about a minute straight and no misses. This must be a loop, I remember thinking. But then someone walked by in the background, and, eventually, McCoy began answering questions in the chat. This wasn't prerecorded or looped...this person was really just making these shots.
From there, my algorithm seemingly skewed toward basketball. It was filled with other live shooters, like @masonelitebasketball, or regular people playing 1v1, or TikToks about basketball training, even though I am truly below average pickup player. But here I was, watching people shoot...that's pretty much it, nothing wild...and being unable to scroll past it.
"I see comments like [it's] therapeutic or hypnotizing," McCoy told me in a phone interview. "I see that comment all the time, but it's something I don't think about. Because I'm just shooting... People are commenting saying, 'I don't even like basketball but I like watching you.'"
For the record, McCoy insists it's never a loop and that he didn't even know what a loop meant when his TikToks first started taking off. Still, he has to wear t-shirts that literally say "it's not a loop" during his TikToks and answer questions during the livestreams to assure people he's the real deal. Of course, they could just Google him. McCoy, 25, just finished his college basketball career at Young Harris College in Georgia — where he was a great shooter — and they could see he now runs a basketball skills company, aimed at helping kids improve.
McCoy is far from the only person who shoots basketballs live on TikTok, though. I reckon he might be among the most popular shooters out there with some 150,000 followers. But look at this panorama of livestreams that have hit my FYP over the last few weeks. This isn't even counting the regular TikToks I'm now fed, by the way. These are only a few of the livestreams.
And here are some more.
There's something vaguely aspirational to the basketball shooting TikToks like McCoy's, in particular. Like sure, dude's record is 119 three-pointers in a row, but it's not like he's slamming down dunks. You could imagine doing 10,000 hours of practice and getting really good at shooting a basketball. That's long been tied to Steph Curry's wild popularity with young folks — he's doing relatable stuff like shooting, not catching alley-oops or being seven feet tall.
But there's also some kind of admirable ASMR quality to it the live TikToks. McCoy, for instance, seems to never do a single thing different. His form is perfect, his feet just so, his elbow in perfect alignment with his shoulder, the follow-through clean. You hardly even have to watch: The ball swishes the net. It's visual white noise. That's why people think it's a loop. It's too perfect.
"That's probably the biggest compliment you can give a shooter: My shot is super consistent," McCoy said.
I'm not the only one obsessed or sucked into these TikToks. McCoy described starting out on TikTok shooting for basically...no one but his family. Then one day, someone came down to the gym and asked to say hi to his audience, revealing that 3,000 people were watching the livestream. About a year later, McCoy goes live for an hour and a half every day and averages a total of 250,000 total viewers per stream. The largest audience at any given moment on one of his streams, McCoy said, was 20,000 people. That's an NBA arena capacity crowd, all for some guy swishing jumpers in the gym of a liberal arts school.
McCoy is working to transform that popularity into a business helping kids learn basketball, 6ixShooter Academy. It seems to be working. He said he now gets nearly 1,000 DMs a day from people either using his shooting program or kids who want help with their game. All this from TikTok.
Of course not everyone watching basketball livestreams on TikTok are kids working on their jumper. Sometimes it's just some guy who writes on the internet for a living. He's not bored, but not really doing anything, and about 30 minutes into a TikTok binge. A scroll down and suddenly there's someone, sweat pouring down his back, swishing jumper after jumper after jumper on a livestream. And this person watching can't really explain it — he's not actively entertained — but he's not scrolling away, either. The automatic rebounder whirrs — swish, catch, shoot, swish, catch, shoot, swish, — and the misses never come.
Topics TikTok
Tim Marcin is an Associate Editor on the culture team at Mashable, where he mostly digs into the weird parts of the internet. You'll also see some coverage of memes, tech, sports, trends, and the occasional hot take. You can find him on Bluesky (sometimes), Instagram (infrequently), or eating Buffalo wings (as often as possible).
