The Endless Summer: Social Media
The implications of the social media revolution and its pertinence to recruiting is undoubtedly salient, but it seems that many college hopefuls still do not know how to utilize their accounts properly. The 2010s have ushered new rules in recruiting…
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Continue ReadingThe implications of the social media revolution and its pertinence to recruiting is undoubtedly salient, but it seems that many college hopefuls still do not know how to utilize their accounts properly.
The 2010s have ushered new rules in recruiting as new loopholes and weak spots have come about. However, one area that has been left relatively unchecked from the athlete’s perspective is his or her social media. This leaves athletes complete autonomy to squander – or boost – their recruiting success with their Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat or Facebook.
Because of that, I polled the opinions from coaches at the Ju-Co, D-II and D-I levels on recruiting advice for this week’s edition of The Endless Summer.
The Endless Summer A weekly column by Bryce McKinnis |
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Out of respect for privacy to both parties, I have left the coaches’ and institutions’ names anonymous.)
Of the three coaches I spoke with, all three mentioned Twitter as the biggest social media platform for recruiting.
“We use Twitter a ton to recruit,”the NJCAA coach said.
Each coach mentioned a list of his “turn-offs” or disqualifications for recruits, each noting some trends that they found distasteful.
“The ‘retweet or this will happen to you’ trend needs to stop,” said the NJCAA coach. “I’ve seen way too many gruesome injuries pop up in my TL.”
“No-no’s include bad-mouthing of current teammates and coaches,” the D-I coach said, who also mentioned vulgarity as a turn-off.
The D-II coach noted a few potential disqualifications, including sexually-explicit images or videos, promotion of any type of drug, fighting and violence.
“All of the above also applies to Retweets and/or likes,” the D-II coach said, “From my perspective, that is the same as if they put that out themselves.”
The three coaches also did not hold back on expressing the importance of keeping your social media accounts clean and its potential effects on recruiting.
“I will do research by visiting (the recruit’s) social media pages to find out if he would be a good fit for our program,” said the D-I coach. “In the end, the social media pages of a prospect go into the overall evaluation of a recruit along with other character research, skill and ability as well as personal interactions.”
The D-II coach even said that he has discontinued his school’s involvement in recruiting prospects in the past for bad behavior on social media accounts.
“I’ve definitely stopped recruiting or never started recruiting kids based on their social media,” he said.
Considering those restrictions, what can a recruit do with his or her social media? Here’s my advice.
1.) Never retweet, like or tweet any content with any cuss words or any of the other aforementioned no-no’s.
2.) You can share tweets privately with your friends if you think a tweet is funny.
3.) Your name should either be in your Twitter handle or in your Twitter name. Scouts shouldn’t have to ask where to find you.
4.) If anybody makes a highlight package for you, ask them to use a clean cut of a song. If a highlight reel ever has any explicit lyricism in it, don’t post it.
5.) Keep your Snapchat private; do not add anybody whom you don’t know.
6.) Don’t post on your instagram more than one per week, unless you’re on vacation. It’s just kind of annoying.
7.) In general, just don’t post dumb stuff. It’s not that hard.
Do you guys want to see the worst tweet of all time?
Make the effort to keep your girl or she'll make the effort to find somebody else
— Bryce McKinnis (@McKinnisBryce) June 30, 2016
Yep. Sixteen-year-old Bryce actually thought tweeting this would be a good idea.
And because of that, I had to walk-on.
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