It’s honestly surprising this isn’t a more common action, especially when you consider the amount of trouble Twitter’s led to for a number of prominent athletes. What we have is a head coach of some note trying to nip that directly in the bud by banning his entire team from using Twitter.
The coach in question is Steve Alford, and he’s the head coach of the New Mexico Lobos. Alford has apparently had enough of athletes making fools of themselves, and so, instead of suffering the ignominy of a misguided tweet from one of his players, a denial of service attack was aimed at his team’s use of the social media platform. According to reports, Alford’s rule is already in place for current team members, however, the story’s resurfacing has to do with incoming freshmen, Jarion Henry.
Henry is an incredibly prolific Twitter user — seriously, it’s almost out of control for this kid — who compared Twitter to a drug, and considering his seemingly-never-ending use of it, it may just be. Here’s an example of Henry’s Twitter use in the past 24 hours. Maybe “drug” is the perfect word for Twitter in relation to Henry:
Actually, I had to stop the screenshot process right there because the image is already at almost 1700 pixels tall. That’s an impressive amount of Twitter use. Apparently, all Henry does is play basketball and tweet. Like the young man said:
@Mr_6_10
DamImTallTwitter is a bad drug
9 hours ago via Twitter for BlackBerry® · powered by @socialditto
Since he decided to play for Steve Alford, apparently, Henry is going to have to enter Twitter rehab. His Twitter use really is that prolific. When asked about Alford’s rule of no Twitter, Henry didn’t react very well:
Asked via text earlier in the week for his thoughts on Alford’s no-Twitter rule, Henry did not respond.
On his account Thursday, however, he tweeted, “Whatever i tweet is just a Freedom of Speech” followed by an expletive.
When asked again by the Journal on Thursday night if Alford’s rule would be a problem for him, Henry responded, “leave me alone,” with another expletive.
Later that evening, Henry sent an unsolicited text saying, “Naw Im good..All i gotta say is when i get to UNM my Twitter acc. Will be deleted”
Although this is merely speculation, it feels like Henry’s parents/adviser had some input here, leading to the “Naw Im good” response. That being said, considering Henry’s love affair with Twitter, Alford will undoubtedly have to monitor the situation. It should also be noted the head coach, while banning Twitter, allows his student-athletes to use Facebook. Hopefully, Henry finds that fact to be something of a consolation.
Of course, we are in the day and age of Marc Tyler and Kenny Britt, to name a very small amount of the few, and like Britt showed, Twitter is not the only place athletes can allow social media mishaps to occur. Lets we forget, Britt’s social media screw-up came courtesy of his Facebook account.