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View Full Version : Technology and the modern recruit



moonpie23
11-14-2009, 04:56 PM
since some of the comments on the Barnes to Unc thread addressed this, and that one is closed, i thought i'd bring this up. please don't look at this as criticism, i just want to get a thread going about the importance of it.

I would never be rude enough to suggest to the staff that they were behind in the techie world, but i DO wonder just how hip they (and the unc and other school's staff) are. How does the staff of a major basketball program allow a player to actually stream and un-authorized, un-supervised VIDEO PRESS conference from his dorm room?

I would bet that Harrison did not call coach WILLIAMS' skype number. More likely and assistant coach or other staffer, or maybe even one of the players. I follow coach collins on twitter, but when i asked coach K if the "k" account on twitter was his, he said he didn't even have one.

Is Roy Williams "hip'? does his staff cover for his NON-hipness?

My point is....there's a new sheriff in town........Skype, twitter, facebook, myspace, texting, MMS, Ustream, Ichat, Iphone, P2P, broadband, bit torrents, bandwidth, youtube, Google voice and on and on and on....

this is the way the kids of today think and live. I'm not saying that's why Harrison picked "other".....but i DO think that his "skype" announcement showed how important these tech avenues are to these kids..

If you're going to be doing business with the youth of today, you come across as being a little displaced if you can't speak the lingo....


18/1.5

dukemsu
11-14-2009, 05:06 PM
since some of the comments on the Barnes to Unc thread addressed this, and that one is closed, i thought i'd bring this up. please don't look at this as criticism, i just want to get a thread going about the importance of it.

I would never be rude enough to suggest to the staff that they were behind in the techie world, but i DO wonder just how hip they (and the unc and other school's staff) are. How does the staff of a major basketball program allow a player to actually stream and un-authorized, un-supervised VIDEO PRESS conference from his dorm room?

I would bet that Harrison did not call coach WILLIAMS' skype number. More likely and assistant coach or other staffer, or maybe even one of the players. I follow coach collins on twitter, but when i asked coach K if the "k" account on twitter was his, he said he didn't even have one.

Is Roy Williams "hip'? does his staff cover for his NON-hipness?

My point is....there's a new sheriff in town........Skype, twitter, facebook, myspace, texting, MMS, Ustream, Ichat, Iphone, P2P, broadband, bit torrents, bandwidth, youtube, Google voice and on and on and on....

this is the way the kids of today think and live. I'm not saying that's why Harrison picked "other".....but i DO think that his "skype" announcement showed how important these tech avenues are to these kids..

If you're going to be doing business with the youth of today, you come across as being a little displaced if you can't speak the lingo....


18/1.5


I'm reasonably sure Ol'Roy had never heard of Skype before this whole thing was set up. Ol' Roy probably does have people around him who are very up on this sort of thing.

Does K? Probably. Winners get to write history, though. I would think Twitter and FB are now basically requirements for programs, or businesses for that matter, much the way web addresses were 10 years ago. Skype hasn't really hit critical mass, though. I don't know how plugged in the Duke staff is, or whose job it would be. Most stuff that coaches "do" in this realm is actually done by an assistant anyway, with a few exceptions (Pete Carroll at USC is a mad Tweeter, as is Cal). Is that why they get so many recruits. I doubt it. But it probably doesn't hurt. It's probably a very small piece of the overall picture.

dukemsu

DukeBlueNikeShox
11-14-2009, 05:35 PM
I think it provide a bit more insight to what's going on in the personal life of a coach or what's going on in a program. It can make them seem more "real" or "hip", especially if they tweet about current music, favorite things and places to eat, etc.

As for the recruiting angle, the NCAA has regulations, but most of the people on the NCAA boards are so old, they have no idea how the social networking sites work. For instance, AOL IM used to be the craze before the NCAA banned it. Now, coaches can be "Facebook friends" with recruits, but they can't write on their wall. You can't AOL IM a recruit, but you can chat with them on Facebook Messenger (isn't that the same as AOL IM?!!). You can't text message recruits, but you can Tweet them (which for many, is the same as a text message). Of course, the coaches argue that the recruits open themselves up to being tweeted by virtue of not blocking the coaches.

Some coaches "follow" recruits and current players on Twitter. One of the funniest incidents happened with South Carolina coach Dawn Staley. One of her players tweeted that "basketball is a job and school is boring because you can't doing anything or have any fun." Dawn tweeted to her: "Be careful what you tweet b/c I can cut ur curfew with the quickness. Ya feel me?" lol

Now if you want to talk about opening a can of worms, think about how agents play into this whole realm....

WiJoe
11-14-2009, 06:56 PM
does the school down the road have anything like Duke Blue Planet?

Azdukefan
11-15-2009, 12:11 PM
does the school down the road have anything like Duke Blue Planet?

Speaking of dukeblueplanet.com, does anyone have any idea when it will be relaunched? I have checked every day since it went down and am eager to see the changes to an already state of the art site. Thanks in advance for the info.