STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — At St. Paul’s Episcopal School in Mobile, Alabama, the high school that produced Crimson Tide quarterbacks AJ McCarron and Jake Coker, there’s a new preseason ritual for football players: the social media talk.
It’s about more than minding their manners. Coach Steve Mask warns players not to post about injuries, which can scare away recruiters. Committing on Twitter to a school is also discouraged—one recent former player tweeted commitments to four different schools without informing any coaches.
“He came across as being not reliable,” Mask said. “He gets a little joy out of the attention, but it’s not worth it.”
This season, Mask is taking his players’ online personas so seriously that he’s assigning an assistant to monitor their accounts. As college programs increasingly use Twitter, Instagram and other social media accounts to evaluate a player’s character, one wrong comment can cost a scholarship offer.
That was the case recently at Penn State for offensive line coach Herb Hand, who took to Twitter recently to vent his frustration with a recruit gone bad online.
“Dropped another prospect this AM due to his social media presence … Actually glad I got to see the ‘real’ person before we offered him,” Hand tweeted.
At Penn State media day last week, Hand said his wife scolded him for the tone of the tweet. Cruel, maybe, but fair.
