Social Media · Athletes
Athlete personal branding: what to post between competitions
By Ekaterina Danberg · November 2026
Between competitions, post what a competition depends on: today's correction from your coach, the kit you really use, your opinions about your sport and who you are outside it. Run three or four named series so you aren't inventing ideas each week. Judge these posts by saves, sends and profile visits, since they usually collect fewer views than a viral clip.
This month I wrote a bank of 30 video ideas for a US ballroom champion whose reels already reach millions. Her problem is a common one with a successful athlete account: people knew the hairspray and the tan, and they didn't know the athlete. The method I used carries over to any sport with a season, so here it is as a calendar.
What the feed had already shown us
I read through 248 reels before writing a single idea. The titles of the strong ones are about the hours around the floor: a coach correcting everybody else at 2.6M views, the winner's walk to dinner at 1.4M, being completely exhausted afterwards at 1.4M, and whether student-athletes have it easy at 261K.
That's good news for your off weeks, because the stretch between two events is full of this material.
Three rules that came first
Talk while your hands are busy
Plenty of athletes freeze when they're told to speak to camera. So give the hands a job: taking down competition hair, taping an ankle, waxing skis, restringing a racket, cleaning a chain. The viewer stays for the process and leaves knowing something about you. The strongest topics on the ballroom account were processes like these, which is why I built the personal stories on top of them.
Start with a hook that has already worked
Take the first line of a video that did well and send it somewhere new. "Hairspray smell always takes me back to..." opened a 2.3M reel. The next version finishes "...the day I almost quit dancing." The viewer arrives on familiar ground and gets a story they haven't heard.
Give each video one job
Show yourself as an athlete, as a coach or as a person, and choose before you film. A single video that attempts all three comes out vague.
A calendar between two events
Adjust the lengths to your season. A swimmer's taper and a boxer's camp run on different clocks, and the order holds for both.
| Phase | What's going on | What I'd post |
|---|---|---|
| First 72 hours | Tired, result still fresh | The drive home: rate the day 1 to 10, what worked, what to fix. Filmed on the phone from the passenger seat, and only if you want to talk. |
| Recovery week | Light work, time at home | What's in the bag and why. Answers to the best comments from the event. The story of one medal, or of one result nobody noticed. |
| Build weeks | Hard, repetitive training | One correction a day. "The thing I've been stuck on for a month, and what's going wrong." What you stole from a rival or a champion, and your attempt at it. |
| The dull middle | Nothing new is happening | Your sport explained to outsiders: why it's scored like that, why people wear that, what that strange habit is about. Part two of the thing you were stuck on: "I finally got it." |
| Last 7 days | Nerves, packing, travel | What you pack. How you actually feel. A difference you've noticed between competing at home and abroad. |
The two-part video earns its place because the second half brings people back to your profile to find the first. It's one of the few formats that asks a viewer to remember you for a few weeks.
Four series worth naming
A series with a fixed name saves you the weekly blank page, and viewers start to recognize it. Four cover almost any sport:
- Training Diary: a number for the day and one correction. Film it right after the session and post only the good ones.
- My Kit: what you really use, with the brand said out loud and written on screen. A cyclist's chamois cream, a runner's blister routine, a dancer's gel. These videos show a company that its category already lives on your account, which feeds straight into your media kit. Don't include anything you don't actually use, and label anything you were given.
- Picks: what you listen to in warm-up, which channels you study, which three athletes a beginner should follow and why. Tagging those athletes starts a relationship, too.
- Your sport, simply: the one that turns you into the expert for people who arrived from a viral video and have never tried it. On the ballroom account 69% of followers are adults, and many of them don't dance.
When the stretch goes badly
Between events is also when you get injured, dropped or beaten in a way that stings. I'd make two agreements in advance. Nothing goes up about a result, a selection or an official's decision until you've spoken to your coach. And no one pushes you to film after a hard day. The "rate your day" video in that ballroom plan has a line on it saying the same thing.
When you're ready, a rehab or comeback is ordinary Training Diary material, with a boring first week and small numbers that creep up. Check with your team before you describe an injury, since a rival's coach can read too. Racing has its own version of the long gap, and I've looked at what an off-season can do for a driver in what sponsors check on a racing driver's account.
What stays private
The ideas bank opens with a safety list. I'd apply it to any athlete:
- No name or uniform of a school, no outside of your home, no house numbers, no license plates, no street signs near where you live.
- Geotag a place after you've left it.
- Never say the routine out loud. "Every Tuesday at 5 I'm at the gym" is a schedule for a stranger.
- Leave weight, diets and "I don't eat before a competition" out of it.
- Check competition costumes frame by frame for angles that could be read the wrong way.
- Students or teammates in frame have agreed, and their full names don't appear.
How I'd measure it
Tell yourself in advance that these videos will get smaller numbers than your best competition-day reel. Their job is to make a stranger care, so I'd track saves, sends, comments, profile visits and follows from each reel. A video with a fifth of the views and twice the follows is the better video for this purpose.
Once you have trial reels, which need 1,000 followers and a public account, use them to test two openings of the same story against non-followers before it goes on your grid. Pick the three that do best at the end of each season and move them into your media kit under an "expert" heading. If you want someone to plan the calendar and direct the filming around your training, that's what I do in account growth.