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Big Shot season 2 star Sara Echeagaray isn’t very good at basketball. In a school game, she once dribbled the ball to the other side of the court and shot at her opponent’s basket thinking the cheers from the crowd and her teammates were merely supporting her all-star skills. Thankfully, she missed the shot, but she did cement herself as a permanent benchwarmer.
At least until Disney+ came calling.
After an initial audition tape — which required a time-consuming showcase of both volleyball and basketball skills — a callback, and a “heart-wrenching” rejection, the 21-year-old finally earned her spot on the fictional Westbrook Sirens basketball team as Ava in the sports dramedy Big Shot.
“I was so sad because I just felt so connected to all the characters. I binge-watched season one and I loved it,” Sara tells Teen Vogue of the initial rejection. “I think after two weeks, when I was finally getting over it, they called me again…and I finally got the role.”
Joining the second season of the hit series, Sara plays an unlikely recruit. After being kicked off her beach volleyball team, she’s drafted onto the school’s basketball team at the behest of the head coach (John Stamos). Tensions rise as the newcomer finds her place among the already-bonded Sirens, causing friction on and off the court.
“Ava, she's definitely like a firecracker and a force to be reckoned with,” Sara says of her character. “She believes that she has to be number one in everything that she does. And I feel like because of that mindset, it really just shakes up season two and the dynamic of the team.”
This season, Big Shot delves deeper into the world of high school basketball, tests friendships, and puts mental health at the forefront of the conversation. “I personally suffer from anxiety, and I think it’s beautiful that we’ve become so self-aware of the fact that it’s okay not to be okay and that it’s okay to ask for help when needed. There’s going to be bad days to highlight the good ones,” Echeagaray says. The show will also give Carolyn “Mouse” Smith (Tisha Custodio) more room to explore her identity and represent the LGBTQ+ community in a more authentic way. “[We’re] showing newer generations that love is love at the end of the day.”
While Sara shares a few similarities with her own character — she’s also a beach volleyball player with a penchant for perfectionism — the social media star-turned-actor didn’t let unnecessary drama come between her and her new castmates. In fact, the team’s basketball training under the supervision of pro-baller Keyla Snowden, helped them bond in a matter of hours.
“I was very scared going into this because I was like, literally how am I going to be convincing that I play basketball? But we had an amazing professional basketball player with us,” Sara says. “I thought [training] was gonna be a lot more gruesome than it was. But it was so much fun because that's when I got to first meet the girls, too. They were so goofy and they just had fun with it. After training with Keyla, I was able to shoot three pointers like nothing.”
Not only was Sara a fan of the show before joining, she says her new coach, played by Stamos, was a household name. She’d watch him in Full House growing up, which made her first encounter with him pretty wild. After a long, 15-hour day, she was covered in sweat and Stamos asked her to make a TikTok. It’s now one of her most viral videos at nearly 7 million views and 1.2 million likes.
TikTok content
While Sara wasn’t playing high school basketball when she got her big shot at TikTok fame, she was studying business in college. It was a back-up plan suggested by her mother if acting didn’t work out. She started posting to TikTok in late 2019 and quickly found an audience for her one-woman reenactments of popular trending sounds and famous TV scenes. She eventually found both her agent and her manager through the app, started to take auditioning seriously, signed up for acting classes, and amassed more than 7.4 million followers and 291.1 million likes (and counting).
Nothing, however, prepared her for the “tremendously different” experience it would be on set. “With TikTok acting, I’m the producer, I’m the director, I’m the actress, I’m the costume designer. Being on set, you have an entire team behind you,” she says. “You’re just the actress at the end of the day. But it is a lot more time consuming, and way more thrilling in my opinion. Seeing all the actors on set with you…it's just a lot more exhilarating.”
It’s a moment she’d dreamed about since her days as a seventh-grade theater kid playing the lead role in her school’s knock-off Disney play that can best be described as a questionable Descendents prequel. Landing the lead role as Maleficent, Echeagaray fell in love with the craft of acting and eventually abandoned her Hannah Montana-inspired dream to become a singer.
“[It’s] kid of full circle because I work with Disney,” she laughs. “My school back then didn’t want to pay for copyright stuff, so we made our own musical. I think we called it Royalty High, which was like a school where there was a bunch of Disney princesses and villains and the villains were the underdogs.”
While she’s left her riotous theater days behind her, her passion for entertaining people on and off screen has only continued to grow. She moved to Hollywood in August 2021 and has big plans for what her career might look like. She’s also carving a spot for herself in an industry she never saw herself in growing up and had no connections or money to join. “I didn't see a lot of Hispanic representation in film or television. And when I did, we were often the punchline of a joke,” she says. The Dallas-born Mexican American star hopes to inspire younger generations in her community to go after their dreams, even if they seem unattainable or they don’t see people that look like them in the industry. “[Let’s] show them that we can break through social constructs and rise above the stereotypes. Representation is a hope for the next generation and that anything is going to be possible.”
When she’s not on set choreographing High School Musical dance scenes with her castmates or filming intricate Friends reenactments on TikTok, Sara spends her free time unboxing Mini Brands on YouTube shorts, filming day-in-the-life content for her various social media accounts, or live streaming Valorant on Twitch (as a duelist, her current go-to agents are Raze and Neon).
Meanwhile, she’s finally learned which side of the court to dribble towards, so as not to risk the wrath of the production crew. If she went the wrong way, she jokes, “they’d be yelling cut like no other.”
Big Shot Season 2 starts streaming on Disney+ on October 12.
