If you cover high school/low-level college, do you "@" the players/teams on Twitter?

I don't use athlete's handles but I'm usually tweeting games with my phone and it seems to be more difficult to tag them. I notice I get retweets from many of them anyway. Perhaps they search for their names after games. I will tag them once I get back to my desk.

What amuses me is that I'll get a lot of followers all of a sudden when the team I cover plays one of their rivals. Then most of them drop me afterwards. I guess I'm covering them better than their own paper does (which probably makes some sense; it's down to two days a week and apparently experimented with not having a regular sports writer for a while).

 

No, I don't, at all. Tweeting all my information defeats the purpose of my job.

 

Hardly.

 

A lot of guys have searches built for their names too, but it's that much easier if they're tagged. They get notified right after you tweet. During a game, they won't be re-tweeting until later obviously, but when they aren't on the field, you increase the chances that you'll get re-tweeted. And if you're only tweeting during games, then you aren't tweeting enough.