Scott Fitch was driving in his car four or five years ago when he received a call from a college basketball coach who’d been checking out a couple of his high school players.
The call in itself wasn’t that unusual, said Fitch, the longtime Fairport boys basketball coach who addressed freshmen and sophomores at Avon High School late last month. But what the coach was calling to say - that he was going to continue recruiting one of Fitch’s players but not the other - certainly was.
Fitch didn’t understand. His player was ready to contribute to a college team, was a “good kid” and had been since he was eight years old.
“Well coach Fitch,” the college coach explained, “as part of our recruiting process now, we go back and check out players’ social media accounts. The stuff on his social media, we don’t want at our university.”
Fitch tried to change the coach’s mind, staking his reputation on his player who was about to miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime, but the college coach wasn’t having it.
“Coach Fitch,” the college coach replied, “we really respect you, your kids always do well in college, but we’re not going to recruit him any more.”
Later that night, unable to sleep, Fitch looked up his player’s Twitter account and started reading through his Tweets.
“It wasn’t the kid I knew at all,” Fitch recalled, as Avon students listened silently.
Instead of going back to bed, Fitch Googled the social media accounts of each of the 110 players who’d be attending a basketball camp he was leading the following day.
For many of the players, “the stuff they had on their social media was just wrong,” said Fitch.
The next morning, Fitch sat his players down, put a lock on the basketballs and read their posts aloud.
“I wanted them to feel it. I didn't just want to talk about it,” Fitch said. “It was one of the most powerful days of basketball camp we ever had and it didn't even involve a basketball.”
Fitch’s message to his players at basketball camp that day, and to the underclassmen of Avon High School, was simple: pause before you post. On social media, where nothing is temporary, everything lasts forever and a cruel and stupid thought thumbed into a phone in a fit anger or a misguided attempt at humor can do real harm, Fitch said it pays to stop, think about what you’re about to post and decide if it’s something you really want to follow you around for the rest of your life.
Fitch spoke to Avon High School students back in 2018, said Principal Ryan Wagner. His presentation was engaging and he connected well with students, so Wagner asked him to come back to Avon to address underclassmen who weren’t present for his presentation back in 2018.
“His message of ‘pause before you post’ is really important,” said Wagner. “Teenagers are on social media, posting every day, multiple times a day. They need to be aware of their digital footprint and how they are impacting others. Scott provides a clear message for students around social media use, but also about the importance of contributing to a positive school culture.”
Later on in his presentation, Fitch shared posts from some of his own past players with Avon students. Some were innocent enough, like the one about how it would be funny to steal a Krispy Kreme truck just to see cops chasing after it.
Another player’s post, “Got drunk. Almost died. Good night,” drew laughs from the ninth and tenth graders.
“Funny,” Fitch said. “Then you think of the digital footprint next to that kid’s name the rest of his life and it starts to get a little more serious.”
Others fell squarely under the heading of things you shouldn’t post, said Fitch. Like the photo one of his players posted of himself consuming drugs accompanied by the caption “desperate times call for desperate measures,” or the one that read “Keep pushing her. She will break,” that had been directed at a victim of cyberbullying to try to “push her over the edge.”
Fitch sought to impress on students that words matter and that, no matter how often someone smiles, it’s impossible to know what’s going on inside their head, to divine which words will roll off without leaving a mark and which will leave cuts, as deep as they are invisible.
“They impact somebody. Every time you make a post, it impacts somebody. My thing to you is, how are you impacting people?” Fitch asked Avon students. “Are you cool with it? Are you making a difference in people? Are you trying to bring people down? How do you impact people? Maybe sit back and really think about that.”
Fitch has coached the Fairport boys basketball team since 2001 and has served as a coach for multiple USA Basketball junior national teams - including as an assistant coach for the gold-medal winning 2018 USA Men’s U17 World Cup Team and 2017 USA Men’s U16 National Team.
During his college basketball career at SUNY Geneseo, Fitch was a two-time all-American first-team selection and was named the NCAA Division III player of the year in 1994.
Above, Avon students confer on a question about social media asked of them by Scott Fitch, who sought to impress upon students during a presentation late last month some of the consequences that can come when posting to social media without stopping to think.