Twitter is a public space: A fact that many tweeters forget.

In 2014, most high school football players are heavily active on social media and some use it better than others. Many highly touted recruits can use social media as a valuable PR machine, setting announcement dates and keeping their fans – and people that shouldn’t be talking to them – informed of their activities. But some prospects fail to recognize that their inane tweets intended for friends are also seen by the coaches recruiting them. Now, it seems, a poor-tweeting college football recruit has lost a chance to play at Georgia because of it.

While Alabama head coach Nick Saban said he’s never stopped recruiting a player for a tweet, Georgia football head coach Mark Richt apparently did just that. During Georgia’s Media Day, Richt proclaimed that a repeat Twitter offender lost the good graces of the Georgia coaching staff last year. Richt obviously didn’t reveal the name of the abandoned recruit but apparently he wasn’t worth the trouble.

“I can’t publicly say, ‘Hey, we dropped this guy.’ But there’s guys that we drop from the recruiting process because of things that we may find out on a visit … Or we had one kid last year because of what he had on social media. He had some stuff on social media that we didn’t like. We keep an eye on all that.

“We told (the kid and) we told his coach (that) we don’t condone that, and he was a guy who was already committed to Georgia. And he persisted. Well, actually he changed his (Twitter) handle and continued to do that kind of thing thinking we wouldn’t find out. And we found out about it, and we cut him.

“We rescinded that offer to him, because if he’s not going to do what we say to do at that point then what’s going to make us feel like he’s going to do it when he gets here. There’s definitely a vetting process that we’re very serious about.”

The rule for fans on Twitter is never tweet recruits. Maybe the recruits themselves should have someone tweeting for them.

[Atlanta Journal-Constitution]

About Jonathan Biles

Jonathan Biles is a staff writer for Awful Announcing.

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