Troy Williams Highlights What's Wrong with High School Athletes and Twitter

Social media, and Twitter in particular, is an awesome tool with tons of different uses, but its ability to closely link fans and young athletes is alarming. 

This past week of Troy Williams' recruitment process has only highlighted that fact.

First, some background.

Williams, a six-foot-six explosive scorer out of Virginia, is rated as the second-best small forward and sixth-best player in the class of 2013 by ESPN. He's highly sought after but has narrowed his choices down to North Carolina and Kentucky.

He was supposed to announce that decision yesterday, but via Twitter, he changed his mind:

"

POSTPONED the decision for a while. twitter.com/troywilliams_/…

— Troy Williams  (@troywilliams_) May 1, 2012"

I have no problem with Williams delaying his decision. He's still a high school junior, after all. He could delay his decision for an entire year and would still have enough time to pick a college.

I don't, however, like how Williams—or any other young athlete, for that matter—announced the news via Twitter. I realize many high school athletes break news via Twitter these days, but it's just not necessary. 

In fact, they shouldn't even be on Twitter at all. 

All they are doing is bringing unnecessary attention on themselves. Top recruits can have anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 followers (Williams has 5,731). On a daily basis, complete strangers are consistently tweeting at these recruits, begging them to come to their school, trashing the competing schools and essentially acting like children.

Not only is this fairly pathetic of the fans to do, but it's quite probable that some of them are boosters, and anything they tweet to the athletes is completely illegal. 

This relationship between fans and young athletes is becoming too close, and it's extremely alarming. Just take a look at what Carlton Allen, a fellow recruit, Tweeted yesterday:

"

Some unc fan told @troywilliams_ he gon burn his house down if he dnt go to unc, smh lol thats od.

— Future Draft Pick! (@Carlton_Allen32) May 2, 2012"

Burned down house. Real "lol" material indeed. Young players may shake things like this off as a joke, but exposing themselves to fans is unnecessary. 

Threats towards kids—whether they are empty or not—are quite sickening. Grown adults begging and pleading for the services of 17- and 18-year-olds need to stop. 

But the problem circles back around to how seriously these kids take social media. 

For example, Williams has over 26,000 tweets and re-tweets just about everyone who mentions his name. These kids—it's not just Williams—are opening themselves up to fans, and there's nothing positive that can come of it.

This is a two-way street, but we will never be able to stop fans from acting like buffoons. Kids need to avoid the temptation and walk away from Twitter.

At least high school kids do. College and professional athletes, that's a different story. 

Twitter is an amazing tool for networking, breaking news, communication and more, but with these high school kids, it's better to just stick to old-fashioned methods. 

Let them set up interviews with professional journalists and writers. Let them break their news that way. Let them get their name on the interweb that way. Seriously, they'll get just as much exposure as they want without all the negative effects. 

Otherwise, they are just opening up themselves up for unnecessary abuse, attention and negative exposure. 

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