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.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.
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."
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.
