Just Post the Damn Highlights

I need sports team accounts to stop tweeting lingo slop

The above photo is a 2015 tweet that got the Houston Rockets social media manager fired. I found the tweet hilarious at the time, and lamented the result. I do believe that this tweet illustrates what caused a cultural shift in team social media accounts, which I’ll get into, but first, I have a decree to all of them, across sports.

Just post the damn highlights. Please. That’s all I want and doubt I’m alone. We don’t need whatever this is.

Team media accounts have, over the years, been overwhelmed with a usage that I and Amin Elhassan used to call “Internet Patois.” Whatever’s trendy on social media filters down to the way these teams talk at you. I don’t think this is what the public demands, but social media workers demand we receive it.

Perhaps use of quirky online speak is a perk of a relatively low paying job. The above referenced Los Angeles Chargers recently served as flashpoint here. The Chargers posted an opening for “social media coordinator” with an estimated salary of $60,000, drawing backlash. Apparently a loud cohort believed that such a wealthy corporation should offer more compensation.

I didn’t quite see the issue here, but maybe I’m biased due to my own experiences. When I worked in “Media Monitoring” for the NBA in 2009, my annual pay didn’t clear $18,000. That was suboptimal for a guy living in Brooklyn, but during that era’s financial collapse, there were only so many viable options. There were benefits to being employed in a broke sort of way, though. The league laid off roughly 10 percent of the workforce, but didn’t bother to cut me. Apparently I was too little to fail.

Not that I was there for the money. Like so many other workers in sports, I was willing to suffer for the sake proximity to my favorite league. That’s their leverage over you and why the pay is so meager on the lower levels. If you quit your low paying sports job, there will be another college grad eager to take your place. There’s a currency, or least there was back then, in telling friends, “I work for the NBA.”

Anyway, working the corporate media side in sports usually means that you’re low paid and replaceable. The main bonus for some, other than social currency, is that you get to inject your “personality” into a massive account that reaches millions. The guy running the Houston Rockets Twitter channel saw it as his opportunity to use dark absurdist humor under the aegis of a brand more associated with Hakeem Olajuwon.

That sort of thing was a little too much personality for these franchises. Instead of team accounts reflecting the personal voice of those running them, the common style became lingo and memes, i.e. Internet patois. This fashion merged well with the other trend of social media manager as largely female outpost in sports. Speaking in generalities, men are less verbal and less adroit with mirroring social media communication norms. For example, a socially unaware man might, out of nowhere, freak some people out by using the team account to joke about shooting a horse.

I could get more into the history of this bizarre profession, but it would be a distraction from the VERY IMPORTANT demand I’m making: Which is, again…STOP IT.

Just, enough already. No more stupid memes, no more Taylor Swift lyrics, no more teasing the opposing team’s account in a cutesy way. You’re a sports franchise, not a person. When I visit your website, I don’t see soME oNE sArCAsTicAlly wRiTInG LiKE tHis. I get videos and information about the team, which is what I’m looking for. On X, I’m in search of the same. When it comes to your franchise, no, the medium is not the message.

So just post the damn highlights, please. Include the game score on occasion, though I don’t really need that truth be told. This was my experience following the A’s back when they were in Oakland. I merely wanted to see the latest Matt Olson home run, and didn’t get why I had to sift through a bunch of stupid Internet patios and clapping emojis to get there.

You can dismiss this as a cranky niche complaint and I get it, but the annoying presence of Internet patois in this space is so needless and anti charismatic. These team accounts are worse than they should be in part because of it. Though not a Yankee fan, I’ve found myself checking the Jomboy Talkin’ Yanks Twitter feed because it’s so rich in actual baseball clips during the game. An additional bonus of that highlight quantity is a relative absence of the cringe jokes you’ll find on the actual official New York Yankees TL.

Nobody needs that caption. Trust me, they just want to see the Ben Rice highlight. You’re the most staid franchise in sports. You shouldn’t come off as less dignified than fan produced content.

Speaking of content, this Nelly Korda highlight from the LGPA social media team is what we want.

Bring us closer to the action, use an interview, include a song if you’d like. It works wonderfully and it isn’t rocket science. Your job is to show us the people. It’s not pretending to be a person.