Jordan Spurgeon
Last week at Big 12 Media Days, I had the opportunity to get face time with many athletes from all 16 schools.
While Jordan Hamm and myself worked on multiple story angles that’ll be on our site in the coming weeks, I did ask five athletes about their social media use after bad games.
I asked them each the same question, and told them I would leave them anonymous.
The question
What are your personal rules around social media after a “bad” team or individual performance?
The responses
Shout out to the parents for this answer.
“That’s a good question. My parents taught me in high school to stay away from social media whenever I played bad in my high school games or when my team had a tough loss. That didn’t happen much, but when I did I always stayed off of social for sure. I’m still the same way in college, I don’t want to see all that is said about me or my team.”
Not everyone is exposed to healthy social media habits in high school sports.
“Honestly, I stay on social media after bad games. I know we played a lot of bad games last year, and it was so tough to stay away from the negative energy from everyone. I found myself doom scrolling a lot, but I never knew how to stop.”
- I followed up with a second question to this player: Do you think you’ll be able to stay off social media now after bad games?
“Yes, 1000% yes. Our coaching staff has new faces this year and they’ve talked to us about how bad scrolling through hate can be after bad games. We also don’t plan on having many bad games this year haha.”
Sometimes the apps you decide to scroll through determine what you see.
“I only use TikTok and Instagram, so I really don’t see much of the hate to be honest. I know some of my teammates check Twitter [X] after games, and there’s a lot of hate on there usually, so I only use that to post my tape and when I was letting coaches know I was in the transfer portal.”
Not going to call out one superstar athlete we know uses burner accounts…
“So like do I use a burner account?
*I answered “I mean no, but do you?”
“No I don’t haha, but I do scroll through social media and look at comments from all over. Sometimes I respond, but not to the really bad stuff. Of course a lot of it is frustrating to read, but I do find ways to use it as fuel. I have thick skin so it doesn’t bother me really.”
When people are posting things, it isn’t always coming from them.
“To be honest, I let my mom and manager run most of my social media accounts, I stay clear of it most of the time. Sometimes I look after great games and even after bad games, but I don’t post and I don’t really like looking at stuff other than memes. I use different accounts to look at and send memes with my friends if I’m being honest, that’s all I like on social media.”
No one has the right answer for everybody when it comes to social media use. But, it’s smart to spend time thinking about what ways it benefits you and what ways it harms you. Then you can adjust your own rules accordingly.
