social etiquette

As I write this, the first week of Wimbledon is coming to a close - and it’s been peppered with social media rows. The players have mainly stayed off the social platforms, but their families and partners have been in the spotlight. Two incidents in particular made me think about the importance of having a cooling-off period after competitions and other events in your child's sporting life. 

The Wimbledon social media storms

Judy Murray was the first to come under scrutiny - for a two-word comment on someone else's Tweet. Her reply was assumed (rightly or wrongly) to be critical of Emma Raducanu, who decided very last minute to pull out her mixed doubles pairing with Judy’s son Andy. A few days later on Instagram, the girlfriend of American player Taylor Fritz made a thinly veiled reference to his opponent Alexander Zverev’s recent court appearance. Her posts were quickly taken down. In both these cases, the social media reactions and subsequent press coverage overshadowed the sport itself, and created an uncomfortable situation for all the players involved.

Danger zones

As humble sports parents, it's vanishingly unlikely that our social media posts will cause such ructions! But both these episodes go to show the potential dangers of an impulsive tweet, post, comment or reaction in the emotional few hours after a game or announcement. 

The impact that a clumsy or misinterpreted social media comment could have on a young athlete could be very harmful, and might easily escalate to impact other team members, parents and coaches. The same goes for comments in chat groups like WhatsApp. How do we guard against this happening to us? Here’s one idea…

Cooling off

Wimbledon fortnight this year coincided with the general election, and I read some snippets of advice that outgoing MPs had given to the incoming “freshers”. I thought the most useful of these was: “Never post on social media after 10pm, or after drinking alcohol”. Perhaps as sports parents, we should add to the very top of that list the most dangerous time of all: “...or in the 24 hours after a race/competition/team selection”?.  

How we police ourselves to stick to this rule is another matter! Perhaps there’s a gap in the market for a sports parents’s app that locks us out of social media for a set time after our children compete. Better safe than sorry!

Coming Up

In upcoming blog posts I'm going to be looking at smartphone and social media use amongst young athletes (spoiler alert: I'm not a fan of either - and I have some fairly robust evidence to support this position!).

If there are any topics you’d like me to look at (or if you have a name for my new app that’s an improvement on SportsMumsTheWord) please let me know at the contact form! 

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