By day, Erica Coffelt is a middle school speech pathologist.
But late at night and on weekends, she’s a hip-hop dancing TikTok superstar.
A year after being a hit with judges and the audience on NBC’s “America’s Got Talent,” the Sparks mother of two is still dancing, making multiple videos a week.
Coffelt has millions of followers on TikTok and Instagram. Videos of her dancing to pop, hip-hop and R&B hits often go viral, getting hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of views.
When she danced to a New Kids on the Block song, the band shared her video. Other performers have done the same thing.
“Thirteen-year-old me would never believe that I’m doing this,” Coffelt said of her side gig.
Coffelt’s favorite follow came from Kaycee Stroh, who was in the movie “High School Musical,” which was big when Coffelt was growing up.
“Are you really following me?” Coffelt wrote in disbelief. The actress replied and praised her.
“She told me I was great,” Coffelt said, almost in disbelief.
Her rising popularity comes after Coffelt almost didn’t audition for “America’s Got Talent.” She went ahead, remembering a promise she made to herself to do things that scared her.
She received a standing ovation from the live audience.
“You are what this show is all about,” judge Simon Cowell told her.
She moved on to another round on the talent show but was eventually eliminated. But it encouraged Coffelt to keep dancing.
She estimates the videos she makes, most from her kitchen, are about 10% of her life and garner a few extra hundred dollars a month.
“Life is pretty much back to normal,” she said about her brush with fame last year. Normal for her includes focusing on her students, many with disabilities, at Sky Ranch Middle School in Sparks.
She said she’s still trying to figure out which genre of music that would appeal to the most people.
“Is it 80s? Is it 90s? I don’t know,” she said.
She recently started a new series of videos called “Mom! Who is (famous singer)?” The videos, about a minute long, were inspired by her own kids, 3 and 5, who sometimes ask things like “Mom! Who is Lil Jon?” (That video got over six million views.)
In a recent clip, Coffelt appears in her kitchen looking like any mom of toddlers, holding a basket of laundry and wearing pajamas. The title appears over her, as if asked by off-screen kids: “Mom! Who is Janet Jackson?”
A quick cut and Coffelt is head to toe in black, counting down to her spot-on version of “Rhythm Nation.”
She has studied dance but was a basketball star at Reed High School 20 years ago. She’s still got skills, spinning a basketball while dancing to “Space Jam 1.”
It’s hard to watch Coffelt’s dancing videos without smiling.
“It’s hard to escape so much on the internet,” she said. “This is something that is supposed to make people feel happy.”
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