HS Sports in the age of Social Media: When Losing is Winning

Last year, I wrote about how athletics have been instrumental in teaching perseverance in an age of grade inflation.

 That's because, when my team loses, we lose. There are no retakes, no extensions, and no extra credit. And "success" is variable, you do not have to win every game to be successful, and even sometimes when you do win, you didn't "succeed" (read: play) the way you should have. These conditions cultivate athlete and team agency and buy-in for a coach's instruction. This process fosters grit and perseverance.

While I stand by the gist of the thesis, that in sports, unlike school, failure is failure and grit and perseverance are required to succeed, lately I have been worried that college recruitment and social media have encouraged our student-athletes to overcome losses not with grit and teamwork, but with status fueled by individualistic, ego-boosting transactions on social media.

After every game, athletes create highlights and share them on social media to build a brand as a talented athlete. As a result, I've seen my players compute their successes or failure based on how they played as an individual--and what that might mean for status and college recruitment--and not how the team played or what the team needs to do to succeed.

I'm not a Luddite, I see the power of video in sports: it helps athletes learn new skills, it helps coaches game plan and develop players, and hopefully it's helping with equity in college recruiting. But, I think it's imperative that coaches understand what else comes with the combination of cloud-based video and social media.

Even before the pervasive presence of social media, I've regularly heard certain athletes describe a tough game like, "we lost. But, I scored four goals." But social media allows athletes to post their highlights online, or to pull up the game film, jump to their favorite clip, and turn their screen or phone so a classmate or friend can watch. In advisory one morning, I asked a basketball player how his game went last evening; he pulled his phone out of his pocket and showed me the dunks he had in the game. It was already on social media.

As a coach, I get frustrated with the transactional and individualistic nature of sharing ones highlights publicly online, especially after defeat. I can only imagine what it feels like to a team captain that, driven by social norms, has to "like," "comment," or "reshare" a highlight by a teammate posted a day after a tough loss. I'm also concerned about the fact that my athletes are openly sharing all of their best work so that our opponents can easily study our plays, and our best players' tendencies. And I wonder what impact that has on my own team when we go head-to-head with a team with a lot of talent. I know many of my players have seen all their highlights; will that mean they think we won't have a chance and will try less?

At the same time, I must acknowledge that the forces driving the changes described above aren't going anywhere. College coaches are asking for highlights online and athletes gain status when they show off their great work. And, succeeding in one of those areas usually leads to success in the other.
  
When college recruitment requires athletes to extract highlights from every game, I can't be sure players are internalizing my message after a game. When I tell my team we need to play together as a team, we need to talk more on the field, or we need to prepare better for a tough opponent, that doesn't resonate with an athlete looking to make the jump to college sports.

When I played college sports, before highlights on social media, we had to guess how good an incoming player was based on his high school team's success and his statistics. If you had great stats on a bad team and/or in a bad league, you still had to prove yourself. In that sense, your high school team's success mattered to your status as an incoming college athlete.

Today, athletes build status on social media with their highlights. An athlete's most-liked posts are a season-long highlight and college offers. Since athletes around the world are all marketing themselves online, they have plenty of others to follow, like, study, and emulate. This becomes self-sustaining. As a teacher, I've seen my students using a free period to watch other player's highlights on social media. And often, our students choose not play for their high school team because they think playing outside of school is better for college recruitment. This selective participation has gotten worse every year. We had a tennis player at our school that would call in sick when he was matched up against the most talented opponents. We had a number of talented football players threaten to leave the school because our coach left and their acquaintances (and other coaches) at other schools tried to recruit them to leave. All of these decisions are in pursuit of status.

Recently, The Atlantic picked up on this trend in high school and college basketball. The article quotes Chase Adams, who had a 7th grade highlight video rack up 14 million views. He has 100k followers on Instagram. My athletes dream of this:

“at the end of the night, I get a notification on Twitter, ‘Chase Adams new game video.’ The way social media and the video world works, you never know when someone is recording you. They’ll just put out a video as soon as the game is over,' he says.

Now, Adams is followed by NBA players he grew up admiring and local celebrities like the rapper G Herbo. Like the other young athletes he plays with, Adams has become conscious of his own brand."

Our student-athletes are branding themselves online everyday. As coaches, we need to understand this new reality and adapt accordingly. In all of the stories I included in this article, status drives our athlete's decision-making. So, if coaches hope to teach perseverance, teamwork, and how to overcome adversity, they're going to have to figure out how to turn those skills into a new currency, status.

Shoo, Shapiro!: Hosting Civic Conversations without Conservative Media

From the Women’s March to Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the March for Life, few causes have spurred national civic action in the last few years like abortion. While Boomers, Gen X and Millennials have reached an age where their opinions on this divisive issue are largely set, Gen Z is still up for grabs. As a high school teacher, I’ve watched these first-time and soon-to-be voters feeling out their stances, often through empathetic, insightful discussions, only to be foiled at every turn by Ben Shapiro.

It’s powerful to watch sixteen and seventeen year olds contending with abortion: They’re relatively new to the topic, they rarely get the chance to discuss it, and they’re only beginning to understand the consequences of their votes and their beliefs. And when talking to each other, unlike politicians and pundits, they can’t dodge questions, repeat talking points, or preach to the choir. They have to engage and understand their peers--those who will be their lab partner in science, their peer editor in english, and their teammate in debate club. In other words, they have to thoughtfully engage with one another. And that engagement is productive--until someone mentions a taboo created by conservative media--like Planned Parenthood or Medicare for All--that shuts down discussion and prevents my students from seeing the common ground that they share.

This spring, at the private high school where I teach, two junior girls planned an optional student-led forum for those who wanted to talk about the wave of heartbeat bills being passed at the state level. While the students who attended were overwhelmingly sympathetic to the right to choose, I was glad that a couple of pro-life students showed up, too. One student in particular, Joe, argued vigorously that life begins at conception. When someone followed up by asking him about women who were medically or financially not in a position to have a child, Joe suggested that federal grant programs could help with that. But that productive dialogue dissolved when someone pointed out that Joe had just described Planned Parenthood.

“No. Not like Planned Parenthood,” Joe reacted.

Planned Parenthood was a non-starter — his favorite media personality, Ben Shapiro, had made that very clear.

The students continued their discussion, talking about financial support and healthcare for infants. Another pro-life participant said that in order to enact pro-life laws, she felt we must have Medicare for All. This compromise helped pro-choice participants understand another point of view that starts with the same assumption about supporting infants.

Once again, this conservative flashpoint shut the discussion down.

“No. Not medicare for all. That doesn’t work.” Joe said.

Before Planned Parenthood or medicare for all were mentioned, Joe seriously considered the equities of restricting the right to choose and what support society must provide should it force women to carry to term and give birth to children. But once the labels Planned Parenthood and Medicare for All were used, Joe’s independent judgment was overtaken by his devotion to Ben Shapiro. Joe’s knee-jerk reactions, the result of so many hours of listening to the 9th most-downloaded podcast on iOS, impeded the communication and understanding that otherwise characterized the conversation.

After the forum, Joe recommended I listen to Shapiro’s podcast, emailing it to me the next day and assuring me that Shapiro explained Joe’s views much better than Joe ever could. I disagreed. It was powerful to hear Joe voice his own opinions and respond to the arguments of his peers in-person (not to mention, seeing both sides find some common ground). Joe disagreed, noting that he felt “Shapiro [responds to counter arguments] better than anyone”

After the forum officially ended, most of the participants stayed to keep talking. This conversation represented good progress for our students. Often when we discuss social issues, there’s faux agreement in the room because our conservative students remain silent until after the forum, when they can express their ideas in their own echo chamber. For example, a couple of years ago, we had a forum about the Pride Flag because the flag hanging in our student lounge kept getting torn down. Clearly there was a faction at the school that opposed the flag, but no one spoke up at the forum, meaning it failed to achieve any understanding, compromise, or cathartic effect.

I assume liberal students could also stymie compromise, or wait until after the meeting to express their true opinions together, but I’ve never seen it. That could be because of the topics or the format. But one thing is for sure, there is no voice like Shapiro for teenagers on the left.

Empathetic face-to-face conversations are a powerful tool for progress in our current politically polarized era. There’s a lot to be optimistic about with Gen Z. They care about others, they listen, and they engage with each other. They’re still at a stage where they’re open-minded to each others’ views and to their own intuitions--Joe’s intuition, for instance, was that society has an obligation to support mothers and infants. But understanding others and solving nuanced political problems will continue to elude us until we get Ben Shapiro--and the knee-jerk conservatism that he advocates--out of the room.

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If you enjoyed this article, also check out my blog posts from two years ago called, "Private Twitter and Snapchat: the New Facilitator for Controversial Conversations in High School" and "Controversial Conversations Belong in the Classroom, Not Online."