By Sarah Thomack
St. Joseph Post

Before an athlete plays for a university, coaches check out a player’s skills on the field or on the court and online.

Twitter and other social media platforms have been around for over a decade, so coaches and their staff have adapted and now take the time to check out how a player interacts online versus what their character is like in real life.

“There’s been sometimes where I get on there and I’m like, ‘Man, there’s no way I’m recruiting that guy,’ and there’s, ‘Heck yeah, that’s the type of guy I want to recruit,’” said Matt Williamson, Head Football Coach at Missouri Western State University. “If I’m recruiting a kid… I’ll immediately just flip through his top twenty or thirty, what he’s tweeting and retweeting, and you can kind of find out about a person pretty quick. What people put on there, is kind of who they are… and so you can kind of find out a little bit about a person.”

Williamson said he prefers using Twitter over other social media platforms, as it seems to be the most popular in the college sports world. Williamson said Twitter makes it easier to interact with recruits and he encourages athletes looking to continue their football careers beyond high school to have a Twitter account.

“(From) the recruiting aspect of it, you can kind of keep up to date with them, you might not be able to talk with them, you might… be swiping through or scrolling and see he played in the all-star game and had 10 tackles,” Williamson said. “You didn’t know that before because you’re not able to track the other 250 kids you’re all kind of recruiting at the same time. So you see that, it reminds you and you can shoot him a message, ‘Hey man, you had a great game.’ It’s just kind of a reminder for everybody, keeps everybody on each other’s minds.”

As a coach, there are detailed NCAA rules to follow when it comes to contact with recruits at certain times during the recruiting process. When social media came onto the scene, the NCAA saw the need to add rules regarding social media and what coaches can and cannot do and when they can contact a player during the recruitment process. Since the NCAA issued rules regarding social media and recruiting, changes have been implemented through the years to keep up with how social media has grown and evolved.

While coaches check out player’s social media, they, in turn, use social media to show their personality, spread their team mentality and culture and the school’s brand to recruits. Coach Williamson, along with Missouri Western Head Men’s Basketball Coach Sundance Wicks are both active on Twitter using their hashtags #GriffUp #BallTilYouFall and #BYOJ (Bring Your Own Juice).

“You can get your brand out across the world,” Williamson said. “As much as everything gets tagged and retweeted and.. If you can really stamp your brand and who you are as a team or your logo, people just continue to see your stuff so you get to stay on their mind consistently. Your brand, your product, your university, all look more attractive and it’s just like a little reminder for kids that are thinking about that school or your school.”

Once a player is on the team, they are expected to still be conscientious about what they post and represent themselves, their family and the university well. Williamson said three or four people on staff will monitor their football player’s social media activity and talk with them about any concerns. Coach Wicks said he and staff seek to educate and guide players even when it comes to social media. Wicks said they like to have fun with it and staff will go over social media hot topics and talk with players about any questionable posts.

“Our program is pretty simple, we just say don’t do anything to embarrass your name, your family’s name, your program and your community,” Wicks said. “We say promote positivity. Positive things about our program, about our community, about your family, even about you.”

Recently, on the professional level, several Major League Baseball players and NFL draft picks had several offensive Tweets from six or more years ago resurface. That prompted public conversations around each player’s character and whether dismissing it by saying, “they were just a kid” is acceptable. Wicks points out that players now often have had Twitter accounts since they were 14 and “there’s a lot of things that people say that they don’t understand the implications years down the line.”

Both Williamson and Wicks said, with anything similar that may happen with their players, they look to the future and want to know what the player learns moving forward.

“When stuff like that comes out, and you want to confront a person about it, the question I would ask is, ‘Did you learn from it? Have you grown on from that person, from whatever that was, whatever you did, whatever spurred on that moment in time?’” Wicks said. “When it comes to a question about a kid’s past, I will ask kids that we recruit about certain things that I’ve seen and I’m going to ask them, ‘Tell me what you’ve learned from it.’ If they haven’t learned from it, we’ll see that character trait again because you can be fooled in this process… Life is always about growth and progress… and so are we going to infinitely try to become better people and try to use these platforms for good or are we going to try and turn them and make them bad.”