Cost my son/long-snapper a scholarship and I will 'end' you

Kid I covered, from Man, WV went to The U as long snapper and won a national title. He wasn't a scholarship athlete though.
Don't think he played at the NFL level, but he was solid special teams player for the 'Canes for several years.

 

Tell the kid to put his good snaps on an endless loop and put it up on Hudl. That's how all the cool kids get recruited.

 

Wait a second. The tweet didn't even mention the kid's name, right?

 

I'm with everyone else here. The parents' reaction was awful and ridiculous, and the dad/coach should be reprimanded, if not fired. I don't think the kid saw the tweet during the game, either, and if he did, then he won't get anywhere as a player, anyway.

But I want to back it up for a second. I like high school sports, and I've enjoyed covering them over the years, but tweeting from high school sporting events is completely out of control. I've seen tweets from cross-country meets and youth baseball games, for crying out loud. The people who really care are at the game, and I don't think more than straight-up scoring plays/quarter updates are really necessary.

I don't want to imply, by any means, that the reporter in this case "asked for it." The parents overreacted by a mile, but it sounds to me as if that particular play was not even worth tweeting. I know how much news organizations love to market how their reporters are on the scene covering local news, with the technology to send out news instantly, and it's like we're trying to justify our existence now more than ever. But there's an overload, and anything that could possibly be construed as "negative" will be. Most of the times, it's just not worth it.

 

When I covered high school sports, I would only tweet out scoring plays and scores at the ends of quarters. That's useful for people looking for that information, especially other reporters/broadcasters. Can't tell you how many times we were able to snag scores from faraway games due to Twitter. But play-by-play seems a little over the top, unless it's something spectacular.

 

If this kid was a borderline college prospect, I wonder if the parents would've cost him a scholarship with this fiasco. Sometimes you have to tolerate the parents of a stud QB because he's just that good, but who would want to deal with overbearing, controlling helicopter parents of a long snapper?

 

I agree to a point.

It depends on the sport. I think with bigger sports like football and basketball, more detail is fine. But I know someone who has live-tweeted swimming. The mentality of "I'm here, so I might as well tweet about it" is not a good one. I actually think it can hurt your brand.

If you wonder why you're not getting many followers, favorites, retweets, check what you're tweeting. Those things will start coming if you're tweeting good content.

Sorry for the sidebar rant...

 

I think it's valuable to follow people who will keep you up to date on a team, sports, school, etc. and know you can check in to see what's happening. But you don't want to be overwhelmed with inane stuff.

And people -- if you are live tweeting from a game, put the dang score in your tweets.

 

Great point.

There was a kid around here who was not recruited by the local university (30 miles away) because of his dad. The funny thing is, he didn't even last a season where he ended up (conference opponent of local school), but it wasn't because of the dad. Decided to quit because he wanted to have Fridays off so he could go back home to watch his girlfriend's HS games.

 

I absolutely agree with this. Scoring plays, turnovers, end of quarters are fine for football updates. The worst ones I've seen are live tweeting of basketball games, practically a running play-by-play stream of poo.

 

When my paper first started going full steam ahead with all this social media stuff, they had the reporters tweeting out as much of the game as possible while also running a live blog at the same time, to the point where they'd actually miss things going on because they were so busy doing all this other stuff. The head-scratcher was that this expectation was mostly for college and pro reporting... you know, where you can watch the game on TV or listen to it on the radio or watch the computerized game tracker online to get all your play by play.

 

Personally, I like to tweet out facts about the game.

It can be harder in HS because stat availability can be limited beyond game and season, but if you have good sources it helps. Stats like "the last time..." are best, I've found.