During his previous coaching stint with Boise State University, Chris Petersen made sure to keep his players off Twitter.
But now, it appears that the new University of Washington head coach is loosening his social media grip.
Petersen, who became one of the first college coaches to ban his players from using Twitter while at Boise State, won’t implement a similar rule on Montlake — at least not yet.
Instead, he’ll trust that the college athletes won’t make any poor decisions vocalizing their thoughts online.
To help on that front, Petersen recently brought in social media coach Don Yeager to teach his new players more about how to best conduct themselves on Twitter.
“That’s the world we live in,” he said earlier this week after practice. “We’ve got to be able to operate in it, do it the right way, open our eyes and see what kind of message we’re [sharing] about ourselves, the university and what our brand is going to be.”
Petersen said the team is still figuring out exactly how to regulate social media use, adding that even “if you take Twitter away, there’s still five other things they can do.” But so long as the players don’t tweet anything problematic, it seems that he’s now OK with Twitter.
“If they’re good, I’m good — but if they’re not good, it’s going to go away,” Petersen said. “They got to learn how to do it correctly.”
Several players are already active on Twitter. Here are a few tweets from today:
Rain or shine you will always see husky nation!! Love the support. Glad I'm a Husky! #GoDawgs
— Shaq Thompson (@ShaqThompson_7) April 19, 2014
Thanks to all the fans that came by the "Pro Agility" corner and met me! Love the Dawg Fans! Woof
— Kendyl Taylor (@Kendyl13Taylor) April 19, 2014
As for himself, Petersen still does not have a personal Twitter account even though his entire coaching staff is on the social media network.
“The only way I’m doing that is for recruiting,” Petersen said.
Interestingly, Petersen’s predecessor Steve Sarkisian was an active Twitter user while at the UW and was actually at one point ranked in the top 5 for “most popular college football coaches on Twitter.”
Sarkisian, now the head coach at USC, used Twitter heavily for recruiting purposes and would commonly tweet out “Woof!” when receiving a commitment from a high school player. He even re-tweeted his own player’s tweets.
Woof, woof, woof!!!
— Steve Sarkisian (@CoachSark) May 3, 2013
In an interview on The Jim Rome Show this past July, Petersen was asked about his reasoning behind the Twitter ban.
“The important thing is, there are a lot of other social media out there that our kids do use, and they do know, if they’re not smart and careful with it, well, that may go away as well,” Petersen said. “Because it’s a privilege to be here, it’s a privilege to play college football, and if you’re not doing it the right way and really representing certainly this university, your family and the rest of your teammates the way they need to be represented, then you don’t need to be on that stuff.”
Rome also asked the new UW head coach about potentially missing recruiting opportunities by not being active on Twitter.
“I pay close attention to this and ask myself: ‘Is this hurting us and our program by me not [tweeting]?” Petersen said. “If I thought it would at all, I would certainly get on it. But I’m not thinking that it does.”
When Petersen was hired back in December, we asked UW president Michael Young what he thought about the Twitter ban.
“I would support my coach if he thinks that is useful for him to make the young men he wants to make, and teach them what he wants to teach them, yeah, sure,” Young said. “But I am not going to second guess my coach.”
Young said that today’s technologies “make it awfully easy to instantly shoot off whatever is on your mind,” and combined with an 18-year-old in a pressure-packed and public environment, it can turn out to be “a recipe for disaster most of the time,” he said.
In any case, Young trusts Petersen to make the right call regarding his players’ Twitter use.
“I have a lot of faith in this guy,” Young said of the new coach. “We don’t just talk to the sportswriters and so forth when we talk about hiring a coach. We talk to former players, and he is incredibly well-regarded by his former players. Whatever he does, he seems to be doing pretty well.”
Other schools vary in terms of how they control social media use. USC, for example, links to players’ Twitter profiles on their roster profile pages. Some have also banned it completely, while others use social media monitoring software.
