Advertisement

Electronic communication with recruits deregulated by NCAA

nick bromberg
Senior writer

If you're a top football recruit, your phone is about to have a lot more notifications on it.

While also banning satellite camps Friday, the NCAA Division I council voted to deregulate electronic communication between football coaches and recruits. The change is applicable in football, cross country, track and field and swimming and diving and includes texting and social media communication.

Previously, coaches were banned from texting players, a ban that's been in place since 2007. A player could text a coach, but the coach could not text back. Now, along with other forms of social media that coaches were using to communicate with recruits, texting is possible.

Texting between NCAA Division I basketball coaches and recruits was deregulated in 2012.

[Check out Dr. Saturday on Tumblr for entertaining things you won’t see on the blog]

Here's what Ohio State coach Urban Meyer had to say about unlimited texting back in February from Cleveland.com:

I hear the stuff about texting," he said. "I want to make this clear why -- and this is a high school coach's and high school player perspective -- not college coaches. Who cares about college coaches? That's not what this is about. It's about them, and not screwing up a high school kid's senior year or junior year. If you text someone, you can't stop that, so you have a phone full of what? Text messages.

"If I don't want to hear from that school they'll keep hitting me because that's their job, and usually it's not them, it's maybe an intern doing it. So here's a kid in high school being bombarded with text messages sitting there doing this all day. If it's social media, you can determine who you want to hear from."

One of Ohio State's self-reported NCAA violations in 2014 was an accidental text from an assistant coach's son to a recruit. And yes, it is possible to block a phone number from texting you, similar to blocking a social media account, though Nevada coach Brian Polian took the same stance as Meyer did.

[Visit Dr. Saturday on Facebook for stories you might have missed and chat with the writers]

- - - - - - -

Nick Bromberg is the assistant editor of Dr. Saturday on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!