Student-Athletes Risking it all With Social Media Behavior

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.

“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.

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