Hidden Gems: Meet Shawn Krantz of Volleyball

Today we’d like to introduce you to Shawn Krantz

Hi Shawn, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I’ve always known I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and I never saw college as a necessary step to get there. When COVID hit and everything moved online, I saw an opportunity to prove it. I started looking for ways to make money from home, and one night in May 2020, I was scrolling Instagram when I realized how many meme pages were monetizing their content through ads.

That got me thinking—if brands were paying random meme pages, why couldn’t I build something in a niche I actually knew? That’s when I thought of volleyball—a sport I had played for years but didn’t see well represented on social media. Instead of starting from scratch, I searched for inactive volleyball pages with 30K+ followers, hoping to buy one. Eventually, I found @volleyball—a simple, powerful username that hadn’t been active since 2017 and had around 40,000 followers. I knew instantly that it was the perfect fit.

The problem was, I had no way of contacting the owner. I DM’d the account, but after a few days with no response, I had to get creative. I started scrolling through every post, every comment, and every person the page was following, looking for any possible lead. That’s when I noticed something interesting—most of the posts had references to Jesus. Whether it was “Jesus made volleyball”, “Merry Christmas, may Jesus bless you”, or Bible quotes, there was a clear pattern.

So I went through the 110 accounts the page followed, searching for someone with a religious connection. About halfway through, I found it—a girl whose bio read:
“I love Jesus more than Kanye loves Kanye.”

I knew immediately: she was the one.

I messaged her, explaining my passion for volleyball and how I wanted to bring the sport to Instagram. I didn’t want to come across as just another random buyer—I wanted her to know that I genuinely cared about growing the sport. She responded quickly, telling me that many people had reached out before but none felt like the right fit. She told me, “You seem perfect for this.”

We negotiated—she asked me to name a price, I offered $80, she countered with $100, and we made the deal. I Venmo’d her on the spot and within minutes, I owned the most valuable username in volleyball.

When I took over the page, my goal was to turn it into the SportsCenter of volleyball—a centralized hub for the best content from across the internet. I reposted highlights, insane plays, viral moments, and everything happening in the volleyball world, making @volleyball the go-to account for the sport’s top moments.

From there, I grew it from 40K to over 233K followers, hitting 1,500+ new followers per day when Reels launched. Running the page became my side business while I transferred to USC, balancing school, partying, and playing volleyball.

Then, we hit some roadblocks.

In 2022, Instagram banned the account for copyright violations. After fighting to get it back, Meta reinstated it, and I kept growing the page. Then, in 2024, it happened again—but this time, they wouldn’t respond. After exhausting every option, I sued Meta—and won. They reinstated @volleyball, but I realized something: I couldn’t run the page the way I wanted by myself anymore.

That’s when I brought in Eric Chabon, a former Cal Lutheran volleyball player and social media expert. Eric was a volleyball addict, knew social media inside and out, and was just as competitive as I was. Together, we transformed @volleyball from a highlights page into an original content powerhouse.

Instead of just reposting great plays, we started creating them. We turned my backyard volleyball court into the grandest stage in the sport, hosting high-energy matchups with Olympians, D1 athletes, influencers, and even rappers.

The response was insane—soon, every major volleyball team wanted to play.
• Our ‘Backyard Volleyball vs. Proffesionals’ YouTube video hit 250K+ views.
• We recreated the D1 vs. D3 National Championship in the backyard
• We hit 10K+ YouTube subscribers and 235K+ on Instagram.

And now, we’re pushing the boundaries of volleyball content with our biggest production yet—a five-terrain volleyball challenge, where we played on snow, sand, turf, grass, and indoor in a single day.

We’re just getting started. Every video we create has to be different, unique, and click-worthy. Our goal is to keep making volleyball exciting for both die-hard fans and people outside the sport—and to build something that lasts.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Not even close.

The biggest challenge has been fighting just to stay in the game—not only against platform bans but also against the constant battle to keep engagement and momentum.

In 2024, my Instagram account was banned overnight due to old copyright strikes dating back to 2021—strikes that should have already been cleared when I was first banned in 2022 and later reinstated. This time, Meta refused to respond to any of my appeals. I tried everything—submitting multiple requests, reaching out through every possible channel, even contacting people with internal connections at Meta—but I got nothing. After months of getting ignored, I realized my only option was to sue Meta.

My case was simple: if Instagram banned me in 2022 for copyright violations, reinstated the account, and let me post for two more years, why would they suddenly retroactively ban me again in 2024 for the same content? I had never violated any policies since the reinstatement. In court, I laid out the case that Meta had either wrongfully reinstated me in 2022 or wrongfully banned me in 2024—either way, it was on them. After months of legal back-and-forth, I won. The court ruled in my favor, and I got @volleyball back.

But even though I won the case, I was still being punished in ways I couldn’t control. Because the account had been dormant for so long, Instagram’s algorithm stopped showing my posts to my own followers. I wasn’t banned anymore, but I was essentially invisible. My engagement tanked, and I lost thousands of followers just from inactivity. It’s taken months of non-stop work just to recover the engagement I once had, and only now am I starting to see real growth again.

At the same time, YouTube has been an entirely different beast. Shooting volleyball videos is physically exhausting, but even more exhausting is when we spend hours setting up a video, hyping it up, and putting everything into it—only to watch it fall flat on camera. Some matchups feel electric in person, but when we go to edit, they just don’t have that same WOW factor. It’s frustrating, because YouTube is brutal—if a video doesn’t grab attention immediately, it dies. We’ve had plenty of moments where we think, this one is going to blow up, and then it just… doesn’t. But the thing about YouTube is, when it hits, it hits. Our best videos have racked up hundreds of thousands of views, proving that when we get it right, people love what we’re building.

The road has been anything but smooth. I’ve lost momentum, lost followers, and had to work twice as hard just to break even. But that’s the game. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that consistency always wins in the end.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
We create high-energy, scroll-stopping volleyball content that extends far beyond the game itself. Our backyard volleyball court has become a social media phenomenon—a place where Olympians, D1 athletes, professional players, and influencers come to compete. But what truly sets us apart is that we’re not polished, we’re raw. We’re not professional players, but when they step onto our home court, we can compete with the best of them. That underdog energy is what makes our content so fun to watch—it feels real, unpredictable, and unscripted.

We’re known for making volleyball engaging, exciting, and impossible to ignore by bringing real personality into the game. Our backyard court has become the most recognizable setting in volleyball content, and it’s all about FOMO—everyone sees it, and everyone wants to play on it. It’s casual, it’s competitive, and it’s reshaping how volleyball is consumed online.

What I’m most proud of is that through all the highs and lows, I never stopped pushing this vision forward. I’ve run this page for over five years, and now it’s turning into something I could’ve only dreamed of—traveling, meeting incredible people, and playing the sport I love alongside my best friends.

I want readers to know that at the core of it all, we’re just a group of best friends with crazy ideas who love volleyball and picked up cameras for the first time to bring them to life. Outside of volleyball, Blake and I run a company together, and Eric and Nathan coach together—but this project? It’s special. It’s fun. And we’re just getting started.

Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
Everything happens for a reason.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/volleyball
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawn-krantz-117092148/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@volleyguys