NCAA TMB
YGTBKM

By A.J. RUSSO, Ph.D.
As published Oct. 17, 2007

Imaginary advertisement:
Chronicle of Higher Education
September 2006

Wanted: Assistant Football Coach for text messaging. Qualifications: Young, able to interpret text messages from recruits and help formulate responses for head coach.

Imaginary text conversation between coach and recruit:

Coach: HRU

Recruit: GR8 DIKY?

Coach: DM ICDI IYKWIM

Recruit: WTH? At least tell me WAYF

Coach: OK DQMOT
YGTBKM

As cell phones and new technologies inundated society and changed the way people communicated at the turn of the new millennium, coaches assessed how these tools might best be used to woo recruits. College sports are big business, so recruiting student athletes is big business.

By the time Y2K + 4 approached, the NCAA had placed limits on the number of times coaches and recruiters could call or visit athletes, but text messages were still fair game.

Then, in 2004, when some questioned the use of TM (the text message for text messaging) by coaches, an NCAA subcommittee on recruiting voted to designate text messages as general correspondence to recruits.

This treated text messages like letters instead of phone calls which are limited based on the recruit’s age, sport and time of year. Therefore, during approved recruiting periods, the NCAA allowed coaches as much general correspondence (and therefore text messaging) as they wanted.

Coaches loved this because it provided greater flexibility for institutions to contact prospective student athletes. And to a certain degree, recruits initially felt it was an advantage to them as well. After all, they could choose to respond or not to a text message. With phone calls they had little choice but to answer the call.

But over the past two years, young recruits found they had to empty their message inboxes several times a day, spend more time answering messages than practicing their sport and take out loans to pay their cell phone bills.

So, this August, the NCAA Division I board of directors banned text messaging and limited electronically transmitted correspondence to e-mails and faxes.

College coaches will have to recruit the old-fashioned way next year. There’s got to be some coaches who will be relieved. It takes time to learn a second language.

Interpretation of imaginary text conversation above:

Coach: HRU? (How are you?)

Recruit: GR8 DIKY? (Great. Do I know you?)

Coach: DM ICDI IYKWIM (Doesn’t matter. I can’t discuss it. If you know what I mean.)

Recruit: WTH? At least tell me WAYF (What the …? At least tell me, where are you from?)

Coach: OK DQMOT (Okay. Don’t quote me on this.)

Title of column:

NCAA TMB (NCAA Text Messaging Ban)
YGTBKM (You’ve got to be kidding me.)

[A.J. Russo received his BS at Hobart College and Masters and Ph.D. at Roswell Park Memorial Institute. He is a professor at Mount Saint Mary's College in Emmitsburg and the author of 10 novels and more than 30 scientific papers. He is the former head men's lacrosse coach at RIT and Mount Saint Mary's College. His opinions do not necessarily reflect those of Mount Saint Mary's College or the Mt. Airy Messenger.

Russo's novel, The Healer, published by Port Town Publishing, has been critically acclaimed. His novel, the Fragile Egg was re-released in 2006 and his novel, New Lodge Affair released in August 2007. All are available at Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com.

Visit A.J. Russo’s Podcast, Novels in Progress, where you can listen to the first five chapters of his newest novel, Recall. New chapters will be posted each week at web.mac.com/ajrusso1]