How TikTok Star Noah Beck Went From Collegiate Soccer Player to Viral Sensation

TikTok sensation Noah Beck walks us through how he got viral on the app, decided to become a Sway Boy, leaving soccer, & his plans for a career as an actor.

Noah Beck
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Image via Samuel Trotter

Noah Beck

Recent Sneaker Shopping guest Noah Beck’s life changed, a lot. This time last year, the 19-year-old Arizona native was attending the University of Portland, on a track that could have likely made him a professional soccer star, and downloading TikTok on a whim. “I downloaded TikTok—didn’t have an account or anything. I downloaded the app because it’s just funny,” Beck explained to Complex via phone. “It was super fun just to scroll through, just a fun thing to have.” Who would’ve known that this random app on his phone would completely change the course of his future?

Beck’s TikTok account, at the time of this writing, is sitting at 25.1 million followers, with over 1.5 billion likes, and for him, it came relatively easy. “After I worked out and trained, I just made videos. I posted around three or four a day. It’s not hard at all. People are like, ‘three or four, that’s a lot,’ but it’s 15-second videos, so it’s not a hard thing.” It’s just that Noah’s videos blew up, almost immediately. Beck described TikTok as initially being a hobby, but he also went from waking up one day to 20,000 followers to having to break it to his coach that he’d be leaving the program to pursue this social media career and where it can lead. The future looks bright; Beck’s part of the Sway House, a collective of TikTok influencers who live in a Bel Air mansion with the sole purpose of churning out content for their millions of followers, owning a platform one video at a time.

During our conversation, Beck spoke on the familial competition that lead him to even making videos on TikTok, got candid when speaking on leaving soccer behind, and envisioned where he hopes his future will take him. Here’s Noah Beck’s journey from soccer player to TikTok star, in his own words.

Around the end of January [2020], I was back in Arizona with my family. My sister came into my room and was telling me, “You have TikTok, right?” I’m like, “Yeah.” She’s like, “Do you have an account?” I’m like, “No.” She’s like, “Oh, well I do, and I have like 7,000 followers,” and I’m like, “Good for you.” My sister, she’s 21 now—this isn’t [my] little sister, this is my older sister trying to egg me on. On Instagram, I had around 2,000 [followers]. My sister kept telling me, “I have more than triple your followers on Instagram.” It kind of lit a spark in me. It’s not really a competitive thing, but I made it that—she also made it that. That night, I made an account, posted two videos. I woke up the next morning with 20,000 followers. I instantly got up and I went [to] show my sister.

After that night, I kind of put it aside. I had my little moment of fame, I’m like, “All right, back to school, back to grinding, back the soccer, back to training.” Then quarantine happened and in mid-March, the University of Portland sent all [of us] home. I was back in Arizona and no one knew how long this would last, so I continued to train. You can only train for so long [though], so I was like, “What else can I do during this time? I might as well just start cranking out videos.” I posted around three or four a day. It’s not hard at all. People are like, “three or four, that’s a lot,” but it’s 15-second videos, so it’s not a hard thing. My videos just continued to do really well.

It became a hobby of mine. My followers kept going up. I ended up hitting one million when I was still at home. Around late May, early June, my family decided to go on a vacation in Newport Beach. We were very careful about it. During that time, I still kept up my posting schedule. My family knew about my TikTok, but it wasn’t that big of a deal. In that time, I gained two and a half million followers. I don’t know what was happening, every single video got at least two or three million views—at the time I had around 1.5 million followers. Getting more views than your followers was pretty amazing and consistently doing it.

Back when I had 50,000 followers, [Sway House member] Blake Gray DM’d me on Instagram and was basically like, “I see a lot of potential in you.” At the time he had three million followers on Instagram, [and] a good amount on TikTok. I was like, “Woah, this is pretty cool.” He was like a celebrity. He said, “I see a lot of potential. You can do really well in this business.” I didn’t really think anything of it because I was still so driven on soccer, [but] we kept in touch. When he saw me blowing up and all my videos doing really well, he texted me and said, “You need to come to LA and meet the guys.” I convinced my parents to let me do that. They drove me an hour out of the way.

I got along with the Boys instantly, made some videos, [and] I started to get the Sway followers. With that happening, in that week and a half [with the Sway Boys], I gained another like seven, eight million followers. I had a sit-down meeting with one of the main Boys and one of the managers at the house. They were like, “We think that you would be a great fit here. If you want, there’s a spot. You can make this a living.”

Literally every morning, it’s still like a surreal feeling to me that I wake up and it feels [like] I’m on vacation. I’m super grateful for everything. I think the main thing is, especially for kids of our age to be living a lifestyle like this, is that we don’t get too comfortable. This might not all be here tomorrow, and we just have to realize what we’re doing right now is extremely special. Not everyone gets to do this. It’s an amazing thing, but it’s also something that can get to someone’s head very easily.

What I try to preach to myself is that I just can’t get consumed by this lifestyle. I want to just stay humble, stay head down, do my own thing.

I think a lot of it is who you surround yourself with. We’ve got a good group of Boys here that I live with. Having good people, having mentors and people with experience in this business around you [to] give you background on the do’s and don’ts.

I’ve never been one to be a showy person. I think that just comes naturally for me; it’s just how I was raised.

It’s crazy because since I downloaded the app, it [has been over] a year, but when I really got into social media was late February [2020]. It’s still so surreal. I don’t want to say I’ve changed, it’s just so different going from being an athlete, growing up your whole life [with] one thing in mind—all I ever wanted to do was go pro. I believed I was on the right path and I had the opportunities coming and a virus hits, and makes us all stay inside. I didn’t realize what I was doing at the time, I didn’t realize that it [posting to TikTok] was going to make me a living.

A lot of kids are trying and working really hard to make something of themselves on YouTube or whatever platform it is. But then here I am just sitting at home, making 15-second videos, not taking much time at all, and then this all kind of falls right into my lap. I’m so grateful for it, but it’s just kind of funny how I didn’t really expect any of this to happen. I don’t want to say I didn’t want this to happen, but it was just so crazy that it did happen where it’s like, sometimes I don’t even feel like I deserve what I have right now.

I’ve definitely had to grow up and mature. I didn’t have the same upbringing as most of these guys, because when I was 15, I moved away from my home in Arizona. I moved away to Utah and I played for RSL, which is an MLS feeder team and residency Academy. Basically, I was going to college three years earlier and I had to really mature on my own. I think that helps a lot, especially in this business because I’m a lot more aware and mature with things that I do.

If he ever thinks about returning to soccer

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I miss soccer so much, and there are days where… I’ve gone there before. I still don’t know how to answer it because soccer will forever be my passion. It made me who I am, and I feel it created all my friendships growing up; it created my life. Right now, I always think to myself, “did I make the right decision?” I think I did, and I don’t have any regrets about it. I don’t regret leaving soccer, but I do miss it. I like to think I made the right decision.

I’m still 19 years old. I don’t know if it’s [a social media career] going to be here in two or three years. I don’t know if I’m going to have this platform. I think I just needed to take advantage of what I have right now. I think if something were to ever happen, I would love to go back to play soccer. But right now, I want to be an actor and I want to be a model. I want to do a lot of different things. I didn’t have the outlets to do that when I was just a college athlete. I didn’t even know where to begin. The whole acting process is just so interesting to me. And so I really wanted to be an actor and I really wanted to do modeling and all this stuff. I love soccer so much, but everything is just going so well right now. I just don’t see a fallout with it, knock on wood.

He’s becoming a sneakerhead on the low

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Sneaker Shopping is something that I’ve been watching [since my] early high school days. It was so cool because [if] you think of a celebrity, they’ve been on that show. Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar, Mbappé, those soccer players, they’ve been on it.

I think that show itself got me into shoes. One of my friends growing up in high school, he was a Stock X kind of guy, and he would buy these shoes and then resell them. It was cool how he did it, but it seemed like such a process and I never got into it, but he kept me up to date with these shoes. I started to do my own research and grew this love for shoes, but I was never a crazy sneakerhead. I was never a crazy hype beast. I didn’t have the money; that was obviously a huge factor. At the time I didn’t feel like I needed any of that. I still am a bit careful. I like to think I’m really good with my money and I don’t spend my money on unnecessary things. And I only spend it on necessities, but shoes are my weakness. Shoes, I will spend some good money on just because I think they can really make an outfit pop or they can really just bring out someone’s personality and make a statement at the same time.

I don’t know. Obviously, the world is in such a weird place right now and not many things are open in terms of the modeling world and acting because of COVID. I have a lot going on right now with social media and I have to stay on top of it. But when the time comes, I really want to dive into acting. I want to get really good at it [my craft] and become a really good actor. I want to do modeling with that, and learn a bit more of the entrepreneurial side of things.

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