Ditching social media during games is the only way to go
It'll be a challenge, but the potential rewards outweigh the minuscule dopamine rush.
Have you ever heard something so astounding that you had to replay it on the spot?
While listening to Ethan Strauss’ podcast with Chris Broussard, the subject of beat writers was discussed in today’s social media age and the discussion resonated with me.
Broussard said “I’m not tweeting during a game. I like to just watch the game and focus on it. But now a lot of guys - particularly beat writers - do feel or they want to tweet during a game and for me I just want to watch it take some notes if I want to and zero in on the action.”
Then Strauss responded with something that stopped me in my tracks. He discussed being hired by The Athletic in 2018 to help with their Golden State Warriors coverage. He was used to tweeting during a game but came to a realization.
I said to myself ‘I’m just not going to tweet about the game while the game is happening.’ I do think I produced the best work I produced in my career in that kind of spot and I realized that there’s a creative spend when you’re doing that - you might not think much of it. You might think ‘hey this is just a little thing I’m throwing out there’ or ‘I’m just keeping people invested and all this’ but there’s an energy to that and you’re spending the energy versus keeping that energy in and also - not to be self regarding about my perspective - I realized ‘dude you’ve been giving away your angle to everybody else when you’ve been tweeting like an idiot.’ I would just keep it to myself. I would keep it under wraps, and lo and behold when I put it out there the next day it turned out that it was actually I was the only person saying it as opposed to in the past where ‘whoa, a bunch of people are saying the same thing that I said.’ It’s amazing, you get addicted to just being part of the conversation but it’s to the detriment of what you actually are trying to say and how you are trying to differentiate yourself.
I never thought about the energy being expended on something as futile as tweeting during a game, but what Strauss said is absolutely true. The addiction to the conversation is real.
If you’re posting your thoughts on social media, you’re going to see what others say. There’s a good chance you’ll come across an idea that will strongly resonate with you and it’ll dictate how you think, write or speak about the topic at hand. You’re essentially taking away your own ability to critically think about a subject.
And if you’re mindlessly scrolling away, you’re going to miss something important.
When I reflected on my previous writing stints, there were multiple mistakes made by me and I hope to rectify those with Sideline Slant. With that said, there are a few things in particular I’m going to do different this time around and they are as follows:
I’m not going to scroll or post on social media while the game takes place.
I covered this a bit already, but I’d rather write my own perspective as opposed to getting sucked into endless scrolling & contributing more to the groupthink tank.
Learn the game.
I did not do a good enough job learning about the nuances of football and basketball when I covered the Charlotte 49ers back in the day. I wasn’t focused on the right things. To be a better writer, I need to learn more about the sports I want to write about.
If given the opportunity, build better relationships.
No matter how much analytics wants to quantify every facet of the sports we watch, they are played and ran by human beings. If I’m lucky enough to get chances to interview players, coaches or executives in the future, I need to be better about learning about them and who they are as opposed to seeing content opportunities.
Will I be able to accomplish these things? Time will tell. These are things I can control and it’s up to me to accomplish these goals.