Nice Looks at Coach Tweeting

Many probably saw this first time through, but while doing some prep work, I came across this Andy Staples on-line column at SI. He makes several solid points. One funny one about how positive thinker coaches just believe you can wish the bad news away with enough positive Tweets. The other was something that I guess I had considered, but not really seen expressed this clearly:

Finally, someone needs to fill in coaches on the concept of intellectual property. The Stewart tweet quoted above is part of a series he calls "Mountaineers Rules for Living." These rules, usually erroneously credited to Microsoft founder Bill Gates, were written by conservative pundit Charles J. Sykes. Sykes does not receive credit on Stewart's page.

We all know that coaches like to have "quotes of the day" on white boards and similar guidelines for teams in their squad handbooks. It's one thing to lift information privately for motivation; quite another to do so publicly without attribution.

I think when our student-athletes do it, they call it plagiarism.

Dan Levy over at SportingNews.com pumped out a more recent look at the Twitterverse, and finds it wanting for the most part. He does remind us of a growing problem, noting Pete Carroll of USC:

But fans follow coaches just in case they break some actual news, like Carroll did when announcing the hiring of a new basketball coach at his school before the actual school did.

Reminds me of the guidelines I put into place back in 2000 regarding the proprietary information of the department -- the stuff that once was called "Transactions" in old AP-speak -- could not be released on personal websites. Ah, remember those bad old days when you needed a kid with some programming skill to tell the world she was "retiring," or to let all his friends and followers know he was done with school and headed to the NBA.

Just a Facebook entry away these days.