Twitter is no longer just Twitter. One false tweet can cost you your job, relationship, or even worse, your #brand. For the most part, athletes understand this. They have a ton of PR guys in their ear offering #expert advice. But every once in a while, an athlete will send a tweet out into twitterverse that nudges the boundaries of acceptable online etiquette and even basic human decency. Knowing this, the omniscient Coach Mike Krzyzewski of Duke admitted to following his players under a Twitter alias in an interview with ESPN:
I follow guys. I don’t want to be on Twitter because I don’t care. I don’t want their opinions. I don’t need to show that I have X amount of followers. But I follow a lot of people on Twitter, under an alias. I tell my guys I’m following you. Then if I see something, you text them, you gotta watch. But there are a lot of cool things that they do. I do like that they do it.
Big brother Krzyzewski always keeps a watchful eye over his players. Mediating the behavior of 19-year-olds on the Internet sounds exhausting, but I guess that’s why Coach K gets the big bucks. It’s refreshing to see the Duke helmsman equate Twitter with “cool,” though, while also accepting its impossible-to-avoid presence in his player’s lives.
(ESPN)