February 25, 2009 NCAA IS Limiting The Use Of Social Media For College Athletics
I just got off the phone with Sports Information Director, Derek Inouchi and we had a great conversation about what the Hawaii Athletics Department can do in terms of using social media. They can create accounts for all these social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc.
However, there is an NCAA rule that prohibits all coaches and administrators from contacting and speaking with prospective student athletes (I don’t know the specific wording). This means that while they can create these accounts, they can’t interact with the community the way these social applications where meant to be because they don’t know if the person on the other side is a prospective student athlete. All they can do is get the information out and hope people follow that activities.
So sorry Yoda808…I guess you won’t be following the account but at least we now know why they can’t interact with us.
But this does pose a new question(s). How do we get the NCAA to be more flexible with the usage of social media?
Special thanks to Derek Inouchi for clearing things up! He also told me about some of the things in the works and you may want to follow what UH will be doing….
Tags: college athletics, Derek Inouchi, ncaa, Social Media
- 5 comments
- Posted under Social Media
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Brent
said
Yeah a lot of what I was thinking with recruiting. Coaches are limited to certain time periods of when they can contact recruits, the methods of how they contact them, etc….it would be hard to police social media with so many restrictions. I guess it protects high schoolers from getting inundated with phone calls and mail…it would probably be the same with tweets, facebook messages, etc.
One thing I wonder is that players have facebook and myspace accounts…I wonder what the restrictions are with current players? What’s to stop Tim Tebow from interacting with people on facebook for example?
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David Onoue
said
That’s a good question.
I’m sure a lot of student athletes have MySpace and Facebook accounts, I’ve even friend’ a few. But I think once the player commits to a school, the school needs to make sure that they are protecting their student athletes. The NCAA will strictly protect prospective student athletes because they don’t have that protection.
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Brent
said
Here’s a story with that: There was a a player this past year on Texas that made a racist remark about Obama on his facebook status and got kicked off the team…espn picked it up which probably made it bad.
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Yoda808
said
I’ve actually heard this before about how the NCAA places a lot of restrictions not just on athletic programs, but the student athletes as well. And I agree with the “meaning” behind the rules. We want everyone to have a level playing field when it comes to recruiting as well as allowing for student athletes to have a life off the court and to not have to be pestered by media at all hours–like I said, I get the “meaning” of the rules.
However, I also think that a lot of gripes against NCAA rules are justified and that while that’s the way things are, athletic programs need to be a little more creative about how they approach social media (and by creative I don’t mean cheating). To simply say that they can’t use social media because the NCAA restricts contact between prospective players and the department to me sounds like a cop out. On the flip side, just because you’re not supposed to communicate with prospects does that mean to be safe you shut out fans as well?
To kind of paraphrase a few concepts from Groundswell, you need to listen what your “fans” are saying and find what the best avenue to communicate with them might be.
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David Onoue
said
I agree with you on the Groundswell (that’s a really really good book), but what if your fan is a prospective student athlete? You can never tell, so to be on the safe side you can’t really communicate with them. I honestly think that if the NCAA allows schools to use social media the right way the UH Athletics Department would take full advantage. But as you and I both know, administrators/staff there do read the blogs and the comments…