A video showing a handshake between a Daviess County High School cheerleader and football player was picked up by ESPN and shared on their social media accounts this weekend.
The video begins by tracking Keeli Johnson as she walks to the sideline, where she meets her boyfriend Russ Crowe for a quick and unique handshake. The video was taken during a home playoff game, though they did the handshake before each game of the season. The cheerleaders found old football jerseys to wear over their uniforms for the game.
The video was taken and shared by Keeli’s mother Rachelle Johnson. It went relatively viral on her own accounts in November. It was originally posted to her Instagram account (@rachelle_stone_johnson) on November 5 and has more than 276,000 likes. She also posted the video nearly two weeks later on TikTok (@rachellej13), where it has been watched more than 2 million times with 250,000 likes.
The video was shared on the ESPN TikTok account (@espn) on Saturday, gaining more than 2 million views so far. It was also posted to Instagram from the SportsCenter (@sportscenter) and ESPNW (@espnw) accounts and has nearly 200,000 likes.
Rachelle said she never thought about the video going viral, so she was surprised when ESPN reached out asking for permission to share the clip. The request also came at an appropriate time, as Keeli and the Daviess County cheer team were competing in national championships this weekend.
“I just posted it because it was my daughter and it’s a fun clip,” she said. “I didn’t send the video in. I got a message from ESPN asking if they could reshare it. It was funny because we were at the ESPN Wide World of Sports for Cheer Nationals. They double checked to make sure I owned the rights. And then about 20 minutes later it was on all their platforms.”
