Not that I an old fogy, but when I played high school football the internet was in its inception phase and really the only outside communication was through the newspaper and local radio. Now we have streaming telecasts of games, message boards, tweets, etc. The kids now grow up in a more exposed environment where they can be discussed worldwide in a matter of minutes. I am trying to put myself in a teenager's shoes and think how it would make me feel if my name popped up (positively/negatively) on the internet. What kind of pressure does that add to a kid? Does it add pressure at all since most have grown up with it?

 

The real question is if you are a coach, how do you combat this? I would not think most coaches would want kids posting smack talk against competitors, so do they ban kids from partaking? Do coaches use this stuff as bulletin board material? Do coaches tell kids simply refrain from reading?

When I played, our coaches played they didn't want us looking into things on the internet. We were pretty much told no BGP. I actually had players from our rival school sending me facebook messages on how they were going to beat us. I didn't take it as being worth anything because generally your captains/leaders of your team know better than to be doing that. I think it would all depend on the coach, my high school coach wouldn't want us doing any of that. I have a college roommate that played in Nashville, in their paper an opposing coach talked some smack and that was bulletin boach material for them all week.

When I played a coach never really had to worry about it. We would have lost all enthusiasm after one smack talk call. Took too long to dial the phone using the ol' rotary. We just saved it for the field.

I actually have a pretty good story on how it helped our team. I was team captain my senior year, and was talking to a girl that went to the school we were playing that week. Our coach took the weekend and prepared his game plan and on Monday and Tuesday we prepared with that plan. On Wednesday she texted me telling me there starting QB as well as two starters had gotten in some trouble and were suspended in our game. As well as their star running back being injured and not playing that week. I told some of my teammates the news and it probably took less than 10 minutes before our coach heard the news. He had an assistant coach look into it and found out what i was told was true! If not for that girl and those texts our game plan would not have helped us any and on Friday night we would not have been prepared. It changed our whole game plan and we ended up winning that game 40-0.

Our kids are told no message boards. Our coaches prefer they stay away from that stuff. I have seen kids talk trash to some of our kids on Facebook before but that is about the extent of it. I did get into a conversation with a rival fan on Facebook about our basketball team 2 years ago. I copied and pasted what he said and sent it to our coach. By lunchtime those words had been printed out and taped to each basketball player's locker. We then went on to defeat our rival pretty handily which helped us secure the 1 seed in district that year.

 

 

So yes, I will immediately send any negative words about Boyle County to the proper authorities. Believe that.Lol