Social Media and High School Sports

A few years ago when social media was taking off and I was starting to tweet, I asked my at the time 12 year old techie son Tommy to help me live tweet a Regional Championship Basketball game we were in. I was working the game, and he sat in my office and was supposed to tweet the game score -- sharing it with the world. At halftime, I was getting texts from our school webmaster asking what the score was and what was going on with my twitter. We were losing the game by about 20 points, but Tommy had only been sharing our teams score. So the tweets were "North Shore 15" "North Shore 18" and no score for the opponent -- but we were way behind. I said "Tommy, no one knows the score. They need to see the opponents score too." To which he responded, "Dad, you don't get it. Social media is not supposed to make kids look bad."

That was an interesting lesson to me. Tommy wanted to acknowledge our teams accomplishments in the game. But was sensitive to the impact a losing score so publicly shared might have on our players.

I have been using twitter for about 5-6 years. My twitter handle is @patmchughAD and I share North Shore scores and other things that interest me -- mostly relevant to high school sports. This post will be shared with the world on twitter as soon as I hit the publish button. I see my use of twitter partly as a service to those interested, partly a professional development tool and partly fun. But lately I have begun to worry more about the impact of social media on kids in general.

Sports is a performance business. To get the performance right for each athlete and team you coach there is a process you have to get them through. The process can take a long time and is not all about success. There has to be a fair amount of failure in it. We can go on and on about the importance of overcoming failure as coaches to our athletes, but lets be truthful -- no one enjoys failure.

When I was a classroom teacher, I spent a lot of time on the evaluations of written assignments for my students composing long explanatory evaluations before I listed a grade. When I turned the paper back, though, each student generally ignored the comment -- at first at least -- and looked immediately at their grade. This behavior is understandable but was frustrating to me given the hours I toiled over the appropriate multi-paragraph comment.

If the grade was not what the student expected or felt they deserved, it seemed their emotional reaction to the grade prevented them from reading the extensive comment and doing the necessary personal inventory of the process they were on. Probably totally understandable, but I never got over this issue as a classroom teacher. The whole issue of grading, the at times appearance that students perceived it as unfair or arbitrary despite my efforts to explain before and after an assignment became a road block for me.

In part this is why I transitioned to working in high school sports. Things seemed a whole lot more cut and dry then in the classroom. Every performance had a result. I believed the result could be easily explained and put into context of the seasonal journey we were on. I have always believed I am good at getting athletes to understand the ups and downs of the process that was a season or was a high school athletic career.

But those reasons for moving my educational career to athletics are now over 20 years old, when twitter and websites and the public nature of high school sports was much less.

The sport of cross country is probably one of the most minor of minor high school sports. It gets minuscule attention compared to basketball and football or name just about any other sport. So consider what happens in high school cross country and just magnify it for the major sports.

This weekend our cross country team will participate in the First to the Finish Invitational in Peoria Illinois. Our team is not a top team in the state in cross country, but we have runners who are quite invested in their performance. We go to this meet for a couple reasons but one in particular. Detweiller Park is a legendary course that has hosted the Illinois state cross country meet for over 40 years. Because literally 1000's of high school runners run this course every year, there is a history of performance that is deep and there are performance standards per gender. If you approach running under 15 minutes for boys or under 18 minutes for girls on this 3 mile course, that means something to those in the sport. But even an improved performance at Detweiller from last year means something significant to coaches and athletes who are on this journey of improved performance.

Regardless of how our athletes run, their performance will be listed on at least three websites -- not including the North Shore Country Day School's site -- that specialize in covering high school running. On several of these sites a profile exists of each of our athletes and they can easily see how they did compared to the last time they ran not just at Detweiller but any high school 3 mile race. On one level, that's a great resource. On another level the impact on kids is starting to frighten me a bit as these profiles are totally public and open for anyone to look at and consider the performance without context.

And this has real life impacts on kids. Through these websites, I have gotten to know athletes on other teams a lot better. One particular runner, I watched last year have a terrific year until right near the end of the spring. All of a sudden their performance tanked. Not knowing the runner by anything other than their profile on these websites, I wondered how a runner's performance who I thought should be near the top of state, start heading down so dramatically. The answer I worried was confirmed over the summer -- stress and anxiety got to this athlete and it just became disruptive to performance.

One of my first posts on this blog, I wrote about one of my great athletic failures. I was disqualified at the Baltimore City track championships in the spring of 1979 for an arbitrary reason which prevented me from accomplishing my goal for the season which was to win the 3000m run. I cried all the way home in my coaches car, and I cried a lot of the rest of that evening. There are few times in my life I remember crying so hard. I was just so personally invested in that goal. However, the moment was transformational for me. After a couple of days, I realized I loved to run. I realized I wanted to run in college. I realized that life is so much better when you have a positive passion. These realizations have led me to a much fuller life despite falling short of a number of athletic goals I set for myself. On my athletic journey, I have met lots of interesting nice people who I share so much in common with. I have gone to lots of places I never thought I would go to. And I have a job where I can share the lessons I learned from my failures with young people and guide them in a better direction.

What was helpful in moving ahead from that disappointment in 1979 is, other than my coach and maybe my parents, no one else really was concerned with my failure. Most people didn't even know. There was no public acknowledgement at my school. There was not even a newspaper mention. There was obviously no websites, twitter or Facebook. I learned to take it all in stride and within a couple days was able to put my disqualification into an appropriate context.

A few years ago, I got a long email from a North Shore mom of the time who observed and then described the encouragement I thought I was giving her child to try again and again and again despite their struggles at a complicated physical task as a humiliating incident. I thought the mom who had walked up in the middle of a longer process and got only a snap shot of what was going on as missing the point. But the email gave me pause about the whole issue of humiliation.

Public failure in sports -- or anything -- can be humiliating. It may be even more humiliating in the current climate of twitter and Facebook and websites that constantly reminds us how we are doing. Everyone knows that failure is an important part of growth, but most of us want to keep our failures as private as possible.

When I graded those papers years ago, if a student was disappointed in their grade it was still a private affair between me, the student and maybe their parents if it was particularly poor. But a sports performance today for just about every one of our athletes can be very public. Given the emotional reaction or investment that kids have to their performance it's all beginning to make me consider how helpful all this public evaluation is. Does increased public attention help the process of improved performance -- sometimes yes; sometimes no.

I love the sharing of thoughts and ideas through social media today, but I see more and more the public recognition of high school athletic performance as a double edge sword. The most common issue we hear in schools today that trouble our students are the issues of stress, anxiety and depression. I am no expert as to why these issues are occurring so much more than earlier in my career. But I am worried I am contributing to them. I am going to be thinking and writing about these issues over the next couple of months. I would love your feedback.