The Stunning Transformation Of Katie Feeney

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past decade, we're willing to bet that you've come across Katie Feeney. Since 2019, Feeney has been quickly rising through the ranks of social media influencers. After getting her start on TikTok in high school with lifestyle content, she struck gold in 2021 when she made $1 million from content creation on Snapchat.  

As of this writing, Feeney is a college student at Penn State University and busy building a career as a sports journalist who is well on her way to becoming one of the biggest sports personalities of her generation — one who ushers in a new age of social media reporting. Her career has taken her to the Super Bowl and the White House. As if all of that weren't enough, in 2023, she was named one of Instagram's Creators of Tomorrow.

So, how did she get here? Let's take a look back.

Katie Feeney was a very serious dancer when she was a child. A quick glimpse through her early Instagram posts in 2014 and 2015 reveal that she spent a lot of her childhood in the dance studio and even took part in competitions. 

When Feeney was young, she even trained with Abbey Lee Miller of TLC's "Dance Moms." As Feeney explained on TikTok, she wasn't a part of the series. Instead, she attended because she'd won a scholarship to the dance camp. Spending time at Abby Lee Dance Company did enable her to meet many of the stars from the show, though, including Maddie Ziegler and her sister as well as Nia Sioux. The 2020 TikTok video that Feeney posted featured photos of her and other girls training at Abby Lee Dance Company, and received over 830K likes. "Throwback to when I went to Abby Lee boot camp," she captioned the post. As a teen, she later became an ambassador for Dance Hope Cure in 2017.

Katie Feeney went to Sherwood High School as a teen. While she was there, she got involved in a number of extracurriculars. For one thing, she was on the cheerleading team. She posted a video showing off her skills with a friend on Instagram in 2019.

Feeney also served as the treasurer for her school's student government and ran track and field, where she specialized in the 400-meter race. According to her Instagram feed, she also competed as a high jumper. One video from 2019 showed her doing some high jump practice. In 2019, she also posted a video on TikTok that showed her sprinting, jumping, and hurdling — clearly, she was a total track girlie at school. Feeney's rankings and best times as a track and field athlete can be found on Mile Split. Evidently, Feeney stayed extremely busy as a teen.

In high school, Katie Feeney transitioned from Musical.ly to TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Pretty soon, her videos started to go viral. "I posted all the time and went from 20,000 subs to 3.3 million," she told Elite Daily. Her success continued after the COVID-19 pandemic hit and she started posting more and more videos. "I had a lot of time during that long span so I'd film multiple times per day," she said to the New York Post. Within just three months, she gained 3 million followers. 

As Feeney explained on the "Trading Secrets" podcast, she owes a lot of her success to the fact that she joined the platform when it was still new. "[W]hen a new platform comes out, the earlier you're on the better of a chance you're going to have that success because there's less people on it now," she said. "I would say on TikTok it's much harder to grow at the pace I grew at."

As a child, Katie Feeney didn't have high hopes about going anywhere other than Maryland for university. "I was pretty much set up to go to Maryland, that was my plan, I didn't even really apply to many other schools, but Penn State was always, like, a school I wanted to go to," she told PSN News in 2023. "It made the most sense financially, and my brothers went there," she explained in another interview with Elite Daily.

However, everything changed when she began earning money on social media. Suddenly, she could afford to go to college outside of her home state. She picked Penn State University thanks to its incredible football culture and its school spirit. "And although the campus is huge, it's not surrounded by a big city — it's kind of in the middle of nowhere, but that's what I love about it," she said.

Although Katie Feeney was originally studying business at Penn State, that all changed after going to her first football game at the college. "It was so unreal: the atmosphere, the students... I knew from that point forward, I needed to pursue something in sports, because there really is nothing like it," she told Her Campus.

Ever since then, Feeney has been focusing more and more on sports reporting and content. "[W]hen I first went on the field for a Penn State game as a freshman, everything changed," she told Elite Daily of her decision to pivot from lifestyle content. "My first game was the Penn State White Out, which is a huge game when it comes to Big Ten football," she went on. When Feeney posted a video of the experience, she realized that this was what she wanted her content and her career to be about. "I knew from that moment on that I wanted to do something in sports," she said.

In 2022, Katie Feeney landed a life-changing job as the Washington Commanders' first-ever social media correspondent — in fact, she was the first to hold the title in the entire NFL. It began when the team invited her for a sort of trial to see what kind of content she could create. "That was a surreal moment," she said to Elite Daily. "I was able to go on the field for a bunch of games and go to their training camps. I captured a lot of behind the scenes to show the atmosphere at FedEx Field." 

After she filmed these fun behind-the-scenes clips, the team realized just how powerful Feeney's content could be. "After she came to the home finale last season, our conversation evolved into how she and the team could mutually grow their partnership in 2022," Kevin Kline, the Commanders' social media director said to the New York Post in 2022.

Since then, Feeney has collaborated with the Washington Commanders on numerous videos and met plenty of players and fans.

As if a job with the Washington Commanders wasn't enough, Katie Feeney landed yet another dream job in late 2022 as a White House correspondent for AKSM Media. "Feeney will be responsible for broadening the reporting of the White House via social media platforms as well as detailed coverage of White House events," read the press release at the time. 

For Feeney, this role involved going to the White House "a few times a year" for special events. "Whatever is going on that day, I'll capture it on my phone and edit it," she said to Elite Daily. However, Feeney did have to get used to a new style of reporting — instead of simply filming on her phone, she started working with real cameras. "We'll do a lot of practice standup, so I'll have an actual camera and practice talking about the event, which is new to me because it's definitely broadcasting as opposed to the social media I normally do. It's been cool to merge the two." Clearly, Feeney is well on her way to single-handedly transforming sports journalism.