H ypocritical is probably the best way to describe some of the social media policies for student-athletes.
The University has long fought the idea that the student-athletes who compete for its teams are employees, yet, in its teams’ social media policies, they treat those same athletes exactly as such.
In Tuesday’s Daily Tar Heel article, softball coach Donna Papa compared her team’s policies to those policies a company might enforce for its employees.
This is an accurate assessment of the restrictions placed on her players’ social media activities — in 2013 those restrictions included only allowing players to post ten photos at a time and restricting profile pictures to headshots.
At the same time, Papa gets at the root of the problem: College softball players are not employees, and college softball teams are not companies.
According to Cathy Packer, co-director of UNC Center for Media Law and Policy, if students challenged these rules in court, they would have a strong case. Student-athletes rarely have any incentive to fight these unconstitutional rules because it could disrupt the coach-athlete relationship and jeopardize their scholarship.
The University should not wait to be sued over these rules. Instead, it should proactively make sure its athletes’ First Amendment rights are protected.
Coaches should not have the ability to dictate their players’ behavior on social media as long as student-athletes are not recognized as employees. Nor should they have the ability to pick and choose when to treat a student-athlete like an employee.
