Kids these days.
Whatever happened to don’t speak unless spoken to? Nowadays in the age of social media, kids are posting, linking, and tweeting about what they’re eating, what’s eating them, and pretty much anything else that pops into their delicate little minds.
Usually these random social media musings are inconsequential and forgotten nearly the moment they hit the internet. But within the athletic departments of major NCAA institutions, an ill-advised tweet by a student-athlete can literally sink a program and leave them with sanctions that will take years to recover from.
It’s up to the athletic departments to keep tabs on their student athletes and steer them (and their programs) away from trouble. But what happens when your athletic director thinks “Tweet” is a word that still used to describe avian mating calls?
Many universities have solved this dilemma by hiring social media monitoring services to keep track of what their athletes are saying in the uncensored public sphere.
With so many rules and regulations within the NCAA, many student-athletes don’t even realize it when they’re breaking the rules. Just caught a ride to class by a nice dude in an S-Class Mercedez Benz? How can you not tweet about that?!
Too bad that dude was an agent, and if student-athletes are caught rubbing elbows with agents it can lead to program-wide sanctions like lost scholarships, forfeited games, or loss of postseason eligibility.
Even if it was an individual’s decision that led to the rule-breaking, the NCAA still penalizes the school itself due to a lack of what it calls “institutional control.” Because of this, schools must demonstrate they’re doing everything they can to monitor their athletes’ lives off the field.
Thus, it’s no surprise athletic departments are hiring social media monitoring companies. Athletic departments can now receive alerts whenever specific words, like maybe “alcohol”, “recruit”, or “money” is mentioned by one of their students.
While this may seem to foster an atmosphere of mistrust, it’s much better than the alternatives that some programs are resorting to. The University of New Mexico basketball team recently announced a policy that none of their athletes will be allowed to use social media during the season.
Just imagine trying to recruit a high school senior to play for your basketball after telling him you won’t allow him to use Facebook or Twitter for half the year. Most athletic departments realize that’s simply not an option, so choosing to monitor the accounts is the lesser of two evils.
So while athletic departments might not be able to prevent their athletes from making mistakes, thanks to social media monitoring they can at least look for trends in what they’re saying and intervene before the NCAA infractions committee comes a’knocking.
