Woman Behind NFL TikTok Shares Inside Look at Running Account (Exclusive)

For five seasons, Shannon Domingsil had an opportunity millions of football fans would kill for: she watched every single NFL game for work.

But there was no lounging on the couch during game day; in fact, it was quite the opposite. From the minute of kickoff, it was “so, so, so, hectic,” she says — constant monitoring of multiple video feeds, nonstop video editing, and posting as fast as her fingers would allow her.

“I would blink,” remembers Domingsil, “and it was dinner time.”

Until a few weeks ago, Domingsil was a social media programmer for the NFL. At the end of 2020, when she was just a 22-year-old college graduate, she took the reins of the league’s official TikTok account — growing the platform’s following over the next five years to a staggering 18 million people and punching up its like count to over 1.4 billion.

After leaving the position in August, Domingsil, now 27, sat down with PEOPLE, sharing her journey to the NFL, the goals she set for herself when she joined the organization and what she plans to pursue next.

Ironically enough, Domingsil’s story begins in a city thousands of miles from the nearest NFL team. She was born and raised in Honolulu, and her eyes were always set on someday making it big in the entertainment industry.

“I’ve been singing and performing since I was five years old,” says Domingsil. “But as the daughter of immigrant parents — they were very supportive when I was singing and performing in competitions, but for them, it was never like this could be my career.”

Even though her mom wanted her to be a nurse, Domingsil had no interest. But she did love anything that had to do with cameras and video editing. (“Whenever there was a school project where you could write an essay or make a video, girl, I was making a video,” she laughs.)

Domingsil’s high school counselor recommended she explore broadcast journalism degrees, and so she left Hawaii for a small school in Southern California, where she got her BFA in news and documentary. Still a student, she loaded up her resume with impressive internships at media companies. After graduating in May 2020 — in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic — she was looking for a job.

“For whatever reason, NFL Mic’d Up videos were something I constantly watched during COVID,” says Domingsil, referencing the league’s popular series where players are given mics in their helmets to catch their live commentary during games. “I’m like, this is so funny. This is so silly. I wonder if the NFL is hiring.”

The league was hiring a social media programmer to run its TikTok account, and even though Domingsil says she “wasn’t this huge sports fan,” she decided to submit an application. She got the position.

“It was this huge accomplishment for me,” says Domingsil. “Everyone knows those three little letters.” Even her mom had let go of her dream of her daughter becoming a nurse, now bragging to her friends that her little girl was working for the NFL.

Domingsil got to work: finding ways to repackage football games into digestible clips and experimenting with various TikTok trends. The following year, as pandemic restrictions eased, she started to work out of the office, getting to experience the rush of running the league’s socials on Sundays when there are sometimes ten overlapping games at once. And on Thanksgivings, as her family was going around the dinner table saying what they were thankful for, Domingsil was on the clock — clipping videos from the game to post.

“People romanticize it a lot,” she admits of her job. “But there’s a lot of work that goes into it.”

From the beginning, says Domingsil, she had one overarching goal amid the day-to-day chaos: to make the NFL welcoming to as many demographics as she could.

“As a woman of color in sports, I wanted to make it as inclusive as possible,” she says. “TikTok was a place that I could reach literally anybody.”

Domingsil says she’d sometimes get hateful comments on her personal TikTok page — men questioning why a woman was running the NFL’s account — but she’d also get the opposite: dads thanking her for carving out a space in the league for female fans like their daughters.

“If I can open a door where people can feel comfortable to be like, ‘Oh, it looks like we’re welcome here and it’s a fellow girlie,’ that’s more incentive to lean into it,” continues Domingsil. “We want to create a space where everyone is included and no one feels like they don’t belong to watch this game.”

She also oversaw the NFL’s TikTok as pop superstar Taylor Swift started dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, which sent viewership soaring, particularly among young women. Swift’s appearances also brought an onslaught of criticism from male fans, who were mad that her presence was distracting from the game. (Swift jokingly pushed back when she appeared on Kelce’s podcast in August, sarcastically saying, “I think we all know that if there’s one thing that male sports fans want to see in their spaces and on their screens — it’s more of me.”)

Domingsil, for one, leaned all the way in: In one of her most popular videos on her personal TikTok page, she shows a behind-the-scenes look at editing together a video of Swift’s game day entrances, writing in her post, “job is so silly, job is so fun, job is so girly.”

“You have somebody that is so huge that can bring together so many people, especially women and girls who may not have a huge footprint in the sports world because it’s very male-dominated,” she says of the Grammy winner. “And so when you have an opportunity to bridge the gap between this male-dominated sports world and the girls, gays, theys — whomever — I’m going to do.”

After five busy seasons with the league, Domingsil is proud of the work that she did — integrating the NFL more deeply with pop culture, bringing in new kinds of fans and growing the league’s account to the behemoth it now is — but she’s ready to pivot.

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer​​, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

“I pursued that dream and I fulfilled it,” she says of her NFL job. “I’m really, truly grateful for my time at the NFL, obviously, but I’m even more grateful to have this answered prayer of my life going in the direction I want it to go.”

After leaving the NFL, she has moved back home to Hawaii and picked up some contract work, which gives her more flexibility to dedicate to her next goal of becoming a pop singer. And someday, she hopes that she’s performing sold-out shows in the same stadiums that she used to clip social media content for.

But even though she’s not working for the organization, Domingsil says, she still throws on the game from time to time. 

“I don’t think I’ll tune into every single game because I don’t need to anymore,” she tells PEOPLE. “But whenever I see the guys that I’ve worked with on the field, I’ve got to root for them.”