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Viral Video: As The Play Unfolds

(After watching the video, watch it again and watch the ball after it hits the girl in the face.)

Viral videos are a great topic of conversation. All is takes is one person to bring up something they saw online or on YouTube, and it seems as though everyone else chimes in with a funny video they watched. Viral videos captivate the online world for many reason. Some are funny, while other are emotional. In this case, it is one that is funny. For those of you who already watched the video, it is funny because nothing serious happened to the other girl. It is something that is apart of the game. This video was always special for me because I got to see the progression of the video becoming viral. In most cases, we don't see the video until after it had become viral.

The girl in the video that hits the ball is someone I know. Her name is Mikaela Foecke, and she played for the club that I coached for during my undergrad years in Iowa City, Iowa. She is from a small town about an hour south of Iowa City. In this video, she is a sophomore in high school. Mikalea is now going to be a senior in high school, and it committed to play at the University of Nebraska, as you could probably guess after seeing how hard she can hit the ball.

This video went viral for many different reason. One is because as a sport consumer, we love to see the moments in sport that are "bloopers". I love watching the "Not Top 10 Plays"every Friday on ESPN. The Not Top 10 is a spin off of ESPN's Top Ten Plays they do everyday. The Not Top 10 are ten plays from the week before that are usually bloopers or something else funny that happened in and around sport. This video is one of those plays. It catches the viewers attention because someone took a rocket to the face. Luckily, the girl was okay, so they video had success traveling around the country. If the girl would have been seriously injured, this video would not have been so viral.

Next, I believe the video has so many views because of the content in the video. The video isn't something that views just watch once to get the full effect. The first time watching it, I just watched the girl hit the ball and the girl that got hit. The second time through, I was told to watch the little boy running out of the stands. The little boy who is running out of the stands gets hit by the ball that ricocheted off the girls face. Having to watch the clip multiple times allowed the video to get a much larger number of views if someone would have only watched it once. I watched it three times until it had the full effect.