How Boston Sports Teams Are Using Social Media to Lure Younger Fans

Illustration by Zohar Lazar

Doughnuts may not be the best meal after a grueling morning hockey practice, but for the Boston Bruins, it’s all part of the job—or at least it can be. Fresh off a big win against the Philadelphia Flyers last winter, the players were sitting around a table in the lounge of Brighton’s Warrior Ice Arena when the team’s digital content specialist, Elaine Cavalieri, walked into the room with a mischievous smile on her face and a box of Entenmann’s powdered doughnuts tucked under her arm. Unlike her usual visits, Cavalieri wasn’t there to conduct post-game interviews or talk about which game highlights to feature in a sizzle reel. Instead, she wanted to make a TikTok.

The 27-year-old, who began her career in Boston sports as a Celtics digital production intern before eventually joining the Bruins, knew the team’s TikTok account was in need of new content—she hadn’t posted anything in days—and she was hoping to film them in a comedic “whodunnit”-style video during which they would try to figure out who stole one of their teammate’s snacks.

Luckily, David Pastrňák accepted the role of the jilted doughnut owner, and defenseman Brandon Carlo signed on as the culprit—his face and shirt covered in powdered sugar. Meanwhile, Kevin Shattenkirk, Andrew Peeke, and Jeremy Swayman agreed to play some of the falsely accused suspects. The enthusiasm from the team, Cavalieri says, is genuine. “They know if I’m asking, it’s because I [think the video] is going to do well, and I’m not going to embarrass them,” she says. “They definitely buy-in, but, I mean, you don’t see all the ‘nos’ I get also. They won’t dance. That’s the one thing they will not do.”

Cavalieri’s instincts proved correct; the video performed well. Very well. On TikTok, it amassed 2.2 million views and counting. But it was hardly an anomaly. Last fall, Cavalieri delivered a clip of Brad Marchand rocking a Blue Steel pout and posing to the beat of a trending TikTok sound (3.5 million views and counting), then a video of Swayman and Cavalieri herself on the Bruins Centennial Gala red carpet at the Fairmont Copley Plaza, reenacting an iconic Met Gala moment between a Gen Z influencer and rapper (more than 5 million views).

@nhlbruinsStill trying to find out who ate the donuts.♬ original sound – Boston Bruins

Welcome to the brave new world of sports marketing, where, in some cases, nary a glimpse of a puck or a ball is necessary. While it may seem silly or superfluous, many pro sports organizations believe this kind of marketing is necessary to recruit the next generation of fans. Statistics show that teams are struggling to attract younger supporters: A 2023 survey from Deloitte found that only 58 percent of surveyed Gen Zers and Millennials say that their preferred type of sports content is live events, while 90 percent of Gen Z fans say they instead use social media to consume sports content, such as game clips, highlights, and posts from athletes. Indeed, says Kim Zayotti, the founder and CEO of Blue Sky Sports & Entertainment, a Boston-based sports marketing and talent management firm, “The younger demographic is often saying they would rather watch the highlights than sit through the whole game. The trend across all sports is that the fan base is aging.”

In turn, fewer butts in stadium seats means less revenue for teams, and as a result, teams are marshaling small armies of TikTok-savvy Gen Zers to the frontlines of the battle to recruit new fans the way only someone their own age could do. That means crafting everything from meme-ified videos to expertly edited highlight reels and short films to photo captions that run the gamut from Gen Z slang to pithy one-liners. And while much of the content might not make sense to anyone older than 40, the videos are garnering millions of views, going viral, and often turning the teams’ social media content producers themselves into verified stars.

@celticsDeuce really said “We almost lost” after Game 3 in Dallas 😂♬ original sound – Boston Celtics

The Celtics locker room was dead silent after game three of the recent championship series in Dallas—not to mention extremely tense. But the team’s senior social media manager, Michael Sivo, wasn’t fazed as he sat among the players, his phone ready to capture any behind-the-scenes action. Pointing his camera in the direction of Jayson Tatum, who was sitting with his son, Deuce, the camera was already rolling when the younger Tatum broke the stoic post-game hush with a smile and a one-liner—“We almost lost”—sparking chuckles from the rest of the team, a loving shove from his dad, and a playful “shh” from Jaylen Brown.

Sivo, who’s been working in sports media and broadcasting since college, knew he’d struck social media gold. Oh, this is gonna kill, he recalls thinking before he saved the video to post a few weeks after the title win. “This is hilarious, it’s raw and organic and authentic. And it exploded.” In total, the video got 9.6 million views on Instagram and another 12.1 million views on TikTok and has since become one of the Celtics’ most-viewed social media posts ever—garnering more views and likes than all of their expertly edited and coordinated content. “Situations like that, we had no idea that was coming,” says Sivo, who works closely with the Celtics’ robust content and marketing teams, including videographers, graphic designers, and social media experts. “It really is sometimes as simple as the right place, right time—we’re letting the personalities drive the content.”

These intimate moments aren’t exactly what some fans are used to seeing or even necessarily care about. Yet they’re precisely what Gen Z has come to expect. After all, they grew up regularly consuming behind-the-scenes vlogs (or video blogs) on YouTube and tell-all podcasts. “People want to see the stuff that they never used to see before,” Zayotti says. “They don’t necessarily want to hear a recount of what happened at the game the night before; they want to hear what happened when [the team was] at dinner.”

Over time, these sports-franchise social gurus have all learned a few tricks, including that when to post is just as important as what you’re posting, and that funny clips not only don’t play well after a bad game, but they can make fans angry, too. “The only negative comments are always like ‘Stick to the game, this is why you’re losing,’” Cavalieri says. They’ve also learned that each platform has its own nuances when it comes to what goes viral. Most important, they know that behind-the-scenes access is king, but you must choose, and use, your time with players wisely.

Meanwhile, the stakes of reeling in younger Major League Baseball fans are even higher. That’s because the average age of MLB fans watching live content is 44 as of 2022, older than most other pro sports (the average age for NBA fans is 37 years old; for the NHL, the median is 42 years old). For Kelsey Doherty, the Red Sox’s senior marketing director, her team’s quest to woo a younger, more diverse fan base led it to jump on new social media platforms early. The Sox became the first MLB team on TikTok (2019) and on Threads (2023), as well as the first MLB team to launch an official BeReal account. The franchise has also revamped its Spanish language accounts on X, Instagram, and Facebook, customizing the content for that specific demographic of its fan base. As a result, Boston’s beloved team is leading the MLB pack on social media in terms of followers and engagement. On any given day, Doherty says, the Sox are in the top five on Instagram and Twitter out of 30 MLB teams.

What all of that amounts to on a sweltering game night at Fenway in July is a tightly coordinated, if not chaotic, performance. Doherty and her team capture pre- and post-game videos on iPhones before retreating to the “War Room,” a conference room across Jersey Street. There, they strategically post it at the right time, on the right platform, and with the right copy, all in a bid to give a younger generation “a reason to root for [players] beyond their performance on the field and provide some sense of access that you can’t get elsewhere,” Doherty says.

So what can’t you get elsewhere? How about footage of the players arriving at Fenway on Friday home-game days, posted alongside a “best-dressed” poll—dubbed “Fit Fridays”—on Instagram Stories? Hoping to win the poll on one of those “Fit Fridays” in July, star outfielder Jarren Duran showed up in his friend and teammate Trevor Story’s old jersey from his time with the Colorado Rockies. Stepping across Van Ness Street, he spotted the camera and lifted his arms to the side, giving a spin as he turned back toward the lens with a wide smile. Most other players flash little more than a peace sign or a small nod to the camera, so when Doherty received the clip from the videographers, she knew they had something special.

She and her team quickly got to work. Not only did they post the video as the Fit Fridays Instagram story that day, but Doherty also decided it would go on X—where the standalone, silent clip amassed 30,000 views in 15 minutes (and more than 150,000 views by the top of the 7th inning). After that, the social media team wanted to see how the clip would fare on TikTok—a platform that can be tricky to achieve viral success on due to its young, authenticity-seeking audience. On her iPhone, Doherty scrolled through her saved videos on the app, selecting a trending sound—an influencer talking about putting on a “chill, casual outfit”—to use as the backdrop for the Duran video. Then she hit post and watched the views and likes roll in.

 

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Two days after the Celtics’ recent championship win, the media team posted a minute-long film showcasing moments from the final game. Unlike typical hype videos, it was set to low-key, melodic piano music rather than a bass-bumping song—and the only other sounds included the likes of sneakers squeaking on wood, baskets swooshing, confetti fluttering, and the clap of Joe Mazzulla’s hand on Jayson Tatum’s back as they hugged. The shots and sound design are cinematic. And if you scroll through the comments, you’ll see that people weren’t talking about the players and coaches, or even the game itself. They were talking about the people behind the video: Celtics media team was 82–0 this season. Top media team in the NBA. Another masterpiece from the media team. GIVE. THIS. MEDIA. TEAM. A. DAMN. RING.

It was the culmination of the media team’s effort to up their game this past season, creating something you’d expect from movies, not from short social media clips. “A lot of people wouldn’t expect that the fans would appreciate this stuff so much,” says Gage Duchon, a soft-spoken 20-year-old video producer who took a year off from college at Northeastern to work for the Celtics during this past championship season. “When we won the NBA finals for the first time in 16 years, all the comments are just about the video. That doesn’t make sense.”

During the 2023 basketball season, Duchon amassed a fan base of his own—20,000 followers, to be exact—based solely on his work for the Celtics. Fans now flood his comments section, and he’s become the subject of Reddit threads complimenting his work. When he masterminded a video of nearly a dozen baskets scored by different Celtics players in the first game of the finals, spliced together as if it were one continuous play, viewers could hardly tell where one clip ended and the next began. It received 7 million views on Instagram alone, going so viral that the official Wimbledon tennis tournament account appropriated his format for their own video with U.S. tennis star Coco Gauff.

From the start, Duchon says, he never expected fans to care about who was behind the team’s Instagram account. “With all the attention, it can be uncomfortable because so many people deserve credit,” he says, adding that all he’d hoped to do was make something creative and share it with the world. He didn’t bank on any of it placing him front and center. “I felt the full effect of what social media can be.”

Likewise, Cavalieri gets comments on the Bruins TikTok account dubbing her the “real star” of the team, an “icon,” and even a “GOAT.” But unlike many other influencers, Duchon and Cavalieri aren’t known for their personalities or what they do in their personal lives—their fans are there solely for the sports content they create. (In August, Duchon announced he was leaving the Celtics to create sports videos for a West Coast production house.) Duchon says the attention from fans is a result of the unprecedented access these media teams offer, like watching a Celtics game from high above TD Garden or sitting on a duck boat during the victory parade. “If you know the people inside the machine,” he says, “you are just even further down the rabbit hole.”

Still, what lies at the bottom of the rabbit hole—and what difference social media will make to the success of Boston’s teams—is somewhat up in the air. On the one hand, there is a clear connection between social engagement and revenue, with more followers translating to partnership deals with brands, companies, and advertisers on the platforms. What’s less clear is whether these social media posts are actually getting more people to buy tickets or watch live games—and, by extension, uphold Boston’s reputation as a great sports town—because that’s hard to measure.

There is, though, evidence that seems to indicate social media is increasing the city’s fan base. In Cavalieri’s three seasons with the Bruins, she has grown the team account’s following on TikTok from 30,000 in the fall of 2021 to 486,000 and counting. While the B’s don’t have the most followers in the league, according to Cavalieri, they have the highest engagement rate, which means people are liking, commenting, and viewing the team’s videos more than any other in the NHL. What’s more, NESN data shows that adult female viewership of the Bruins 2022 to 2023 season grew 66 percent from the previous year, while adult viewership overall grew only 30 percent. That’s an increase Cavalieri attributes to social media. “Our engagement on TikTok comes from an average of 70 percent women and 30 percent men,” she says. “I like to think there is a direct connection with the jump in women’s viewership for the Bruins.”

The same goes for the Red Sox, where Doherty sees the results of the team’s social media investment firsthand every day. “The experience of coming to the ballpark is shifting younger, and we’re seeing Fenway become a place to hang out,” she says. “A lot of reason for the shift is the work that has been put into attracting new fans.”

That work, though, rests on the shoulders of the media teams, and the pressure to churn out content that stands out from the endless streams of clickbait and highlight reels online hits hard. “It’s a responsibility to represent all the fans, but also the people in the organization who aren’t making stuff that the public sees,” Duchon says. “Those people watch everything we make, and they want it to represent the hard work that they do.” Yet despite the pressures, there’s something incredibly rewarding about being able to showcase the city’s Title Town reputation. It is just social media, after all. “I’ve learned how hard people go for their teams, for sports, for the Celtics,” Duchon says, “it makes you more passionate to tell those stories.”

First published in the print edition of Boston magazine’s October 2024 issue with the headline, “Becoming Boston’s Next MVP (Most Viral Post).”