Social media and athletes: distraction or destination?

By Hannah Newman

Rider’s student-athletes, living in a sports world driven by digital highlight reels and players with their own podcasts, have to navigate the good and the bad of social media, collecting followers and ducking haters.

Manchester City Head Coach Pep Guardiola banned his players from using their cell phones in locker rooms in 2018, as he claimed they were a distraction, according to a press release by The Daily Mail in September 2018. If players broke that rule, they were fined.

The American Psychology Association published an article on the mental health outcomes of social media usage. The article indicated that students spend nearly five hours a day on social media and 41% of students with the highest social media usage rated their overall mental health as poor and very poor.

However, many athletes get discovered across geographic boundaries and find jobs primarily from their social media presence. 

Raisa Pichardo runs track at Rider and for the Dominican Republic’s national team. She also models for Dominican Active Wear. According to Pichardo, social media has contributed immensely to her success.  

“Not only does [having performances online] help me put myself out there, but it also allows for other people to see what I’m doing and see how hard I work, and see all the things that I’m accomplishing,” said Pichardo.

With social media’s savvy algorithms, it has become inevitable to avoid seeing things that people have once clicked on before. When it comes to watching players alone at the same age as the viewer, Pichardo said it was a challenge to overcome comparing herself to others online as a player growing up. 

“I’ve gotten to a place where, like, now I can say that it makes me better, like it motivates me to do better and work harder, but in the past, it has impacted me negatively, where, like, I compare myself to what they’re doing, and I constantly put myself down for the fact that I’m not in that spot,” said Pichardo.

However athletes that grow up prior to digital society, feel that the distraction of social media is detrimental to the physical and mental well-being of althetes.

Former U.S. Soccer midfielder William Gazonas, who won the Hermann Trophy in 1977 as the top collegiate player, said, “You can waste so much time, there’s only 24 hours in a day. Social media is a huge distraction.” 

Gazonas mentioned that growing up as a player without technology left more room for focus toward people’s goals, especially because there was no one else to compare yourself to if they were not right in front of you.

“You might not realize that ‘OK I’m spending an hour a day on social media and I’m training after school for one hour a day when I really should be training for three hours a day,’” said Gazonas. “It seems like a lot of the time on social media it’s just chatter versus trying to reach your goals.” 

The distractive aspect to social media and cell phones begins with the amount of notifications students get every hour.

Despite what students may be receiving notifications of, the fear of missing something has escalated the anxiety of students, which can alter how they act and what they are capable of accomplishing. 

Aside from their performance being online, athletes themselves fall victim to the time consumption that social media proposes to students daily. 

 Senior sports media major and Rider hockey player Cole Schneider felt that social media is a way to see what is  out there in order to benefit oneself, however it has altered the time he would put in other places, like practicing.

“The use of social media and just phones in general, it definitely takes time away from actually bettering yourself and working to push yourself,” said Schneider.

As cell phone technology advances and social media becomes a primary outlet for news and information, the battle between distraction and determination for betterment continues for students.

“I have twin 13-year-old granddaughters and my daughter says what a difference when they get in trouble for something and they take the phone away, how their focus is so much greater,” said Gazonas.