Does anyone else remember how good Will Hill was when he played for the Florida Gators?
I’m no Gator fan, but I respected his skills from the minute a buddy of mine showed me his high school highlight tape. Fantastic athlete, ballhawk, bigger than most guys in the secondary — this kid had all the tools to hear his name called early in the NFL Draft and, essentially, do whatever he wanted for many pro teams.
And then, he went undrafted.
It wasn’t immediately clear at the time, but a look at his Twitter account (which he has since replaced with a more family-friendly one) tells the whole story. That thing was out of control: full of sexual content, profanity, you name it. I can’t put any of it into print here, but SB Nation’s Spencer Hall went long on it in 2011 for his blog, Every Day Should Be Saturday.
Hill later would claim that he had been “hacked,” but it’s pretty difficult to believe that someone had been compromising his Twitter account for months while he was completely oblivious to it all.
I bring this up now because it recently came back into the national spotlight after Sunday night’s New York Giants-Washington Redskins game, which Hill single-handedly won for the G-Men by strong-arming the ball clean out of Pierre Garcon’s hands. As soon as he made the strip, and the clock struck 0:00, “Will Hill” started trending nationally. And, many of the tweets (and retweets) linked to Hall’s 2011 article.
I had forgotten about it — along with Hill, to some extent — after a while, and started wondering what happened when I heard his name associated with the words “undrafted free agent.”
People are going to be people no matter what happens, and we’re not all going to like what they post on social media. You may get annoyed with those four or five friends who won’t stop posting Bitstrips comics to their Facebook feeds, or with that one uncle who will only stop joking and complaining about President Barack Obama to complain about the Gators on Saturdays. As aggravating as it all can be, it’s not going to hurt anyone.
But, it is important for our young athletes to remember they’re under the microscope, and someone important could easily find fault with something that seemed like no big deal.
Had social media been big (or even in existence) back when some of my favorite athletes were younger, I’m not sure they would have had the same career path or even made it to the pros.
The New York Knicks’ J.R. Smith, who may be one of the most gifted players in the NBA, gets himself in trouble on Twitter often enough today with models and fans and competition from around the league. What would have happened if he were able to tweet like that as a high school senior in New Jersey?
Some kids just go about their business thinking that they won’t get caught, that no one outside their followers will ever see what they put on the Internet. With the way Twitter search has expanded recently and the ability to search for accounts via email, there are no guarantees of that if you’re being recruited anywhere. Although people will argue over this until the end of college football (especially, it seems, whenever someone says “Urban Meyer”), there aren’t a whole lot of coaches who will overlook character in favor of athleticism.
There are those who switch off between accounts. One may be private, for friends only, and one may be public. As a recent college graduate, I can tell you this happens all the time — especially when someone is on the job hunt and doesn’t want employers to see how “turnt up” he or she got at the bar last night. There’s nothing wrong with this kind of juggling, but only if you can guarantee you cannot be easily traced to your public account. And, of course, it’s important to remember that few things ever truly get scrubbed from the Internet, even after you think you’ve deleted them for good.
Young athletes: As someone occasionally tasked with combing through social media feeds, pages and profiles to create stories and share them all over the Internet, I promise you someone will eventually find your “fun” pictures, even if the trail of crumbs you leave behind isn’t obvious right away. If you truly care about where you’re going after high school, the safest play is simply to keep your online presence clean.