Don’t: Bash opposing teams or individual players.Gribble also shares some key information for student-athletes in a blog on her site.

Students: Do’s and don’tsĪndrea Gribble, a parent and former school teacher in Minnesota, launched #SocialSchool4EDU in 2014 to help schools create and use their own social media channels. Forbidding a child from social media is the equivalent of telling them to sit in a corner, he said.

It's unfair to tell kids to stay off social media completely, Fitch says, because much of the time that's how they communicate and interact. Fitch, 46, has become a social media expert over the past five years, giving a presentation on the dangers of it for students more than 500 times. Telling students to stay off social media completely would be the wrong message, says Scott Fitch, a varsity boys basketball coach at Fairport High School near Rochester, New York. Some coaches put team captains in charge of policing their own squads. Parents and coaches set up accounts just to monitor their children and players’ online activity. Facebook stopped being cool for kids years ago, after parents infiltrated the brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg, who recently turned 33. Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram, where collecting “likes” on pictures is a badge of honor, are teens' preferred social channels. But they have been happening for years and aren’t going away. Many social media missteps that result in suspensions may go unreported by media because schools are tight-lipped about revealing reasons why players are benched.

Teens complaining about playing time, cyberbullying someone or taunting an opponent have forced parents, coaches and administrators to be more vigilant about online activity and interactions because you never know who is watching their online activity. Any student – athlete or not – can cause or get in trouble with one bad tweet, picture or online conversation. High school student-athletes must navigate the rough waters of Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and Facebook. It was online just 15 minutes.Ī Division I college program in North Carolina stopped recruiting a quarterback because its recruiting coordinator thought it excessive for a player to post 16 times a day on social media.Īn Ohio soccer player was suspended from his team after he retweeted a picture of a lighter and what appeared to be pot with the message, “ Marijuana is my favorite.” A trash-talking, profane tweet cost a New Hampshire boys basketball player his state Player of the Year award.

Social media basketball trash talker