Blues star says social media is as damaging to NRL players’ careers as alcohol and gambling
Chad Townsend will never see what Kalyn Ponga saw. It wasn’t booze, girls or gambling that made Newcastle Knights coach Nathan Brown return Ponga to fullback just three rounds into the season. It was social media, David Riccio writes.
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Chad Townsend will never see what Kalyn Ponga saw.
Or, more to the point, what Newcastle Knights coach Nathan Brown viewed as so destructive to the mind of his 20-year-old bluechip star, he chose to torch three months of summer training and planning by scrapping Ponga’s short-lived stint at five-eighth.
It wasn’t booze, girls or gambling that made Brown return Ponga to fullback just three rounds into the season.
That trio of vices has diverted the careers of so many young footballers.
It was social media.
In an interview to try to blunt a blue and red axe that is sharpening with every loss, Brown spoke on Fox Sports’ NRL 360 program on Wednesday evening.
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He spoke about the last-placed Knights being a “shandy” away from a positive start to the year.
He spoke about his team failing to compete for each other — the single-most important ingredient required against Parramatta on Sunday.
And typical of the laconic Brown, he joked, too, that it was a good thing Knights Group chief executive Phil Gardner was on holidays — as if to suggest he was safe while the boss was relaxing on a banana lounge.
Brownie would never make a good journo because he buried the lead.
“It wasn’t that it wasn’t going to work out,’’ Brown said of Ponga’s five-eighth switch.
“It’s just that KP is a 20-year-old kid and I didn’t like the fact — and I probably underestimated — there’s a lot of rugby league about these days.
“With all the different shows and all the different social media, to keep reading about his name for three or four months every day in the paper or coming off a show, about how he shouldn’t be playing this, or he should be playing that, I just felt as the coach, it’s my job to not allow the kid to be put into that situation.
“He’s obviously a star in the making and I got a great lesson out of it more than anyone. Kalyn is the first kid of that status (I’ve coached) and I really underestimated the attention and pressure on not only the kid, but the club.’’
Within minutes, Brown’s comments were picked up by rival coaches. Down the phone line of this column, some sniggered at the admission by a sporting coach — seemingly for the first time in rugby league history — that the pressure from social media had contributed to the positional change of a player.
And a club-defining move at that.
“Um, have you seen how much Kalyn puts himself out there on social media?” one coach noted.
But there were other conversations, too, including with a string of players who suggested Brown’s comments deserved more than a retweet.
In the most disturbing of admissions, a NSW State of Origin player told this column that social media was causing as much damage to players’ performances and careers, as alcohol and gambling.
“It was always drinking or the pokies that may start off small but then develop into a massive distraction for players, to the point of ending careers,’’ the Blues player said.
“You can safely put social media into that category, too. You have no idea how a player’s mindset, emotions, preparation and performances swing on what has been said about them on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.
“The next time the TV cameras are inside the dressing rooms after a game, watch how many players have already grabbed their phone to see what people are saying about them on Twitter. I’ve personally had to tell players to stay off it after a bad game because I know it will ruin their entire next week of training.’’
Which brings us to Townsend, Cronulla’s first and only premiership-winning halfback.
In 2015, while playing with the Warriors, Townsend sat inside the head office of club sponsors Red Bull in Auckland.
The players had been invited by the energy drink sponsor to listen to a seminar being given by the then-chief executive of Twitter Australia.
“For me, that meeting was a game-changer,’’ Townsend said.
“He was talking to us about how to use social media in a positive way and so he showed us this tool on Twitter that allows you to mute or block individual words.
“I’d never heard of that tool. So I went into my Twitter settings and muted all the profanity that one would use to criticise me online.
“The ‘F’ word and the ‘C’ word I muted but also other words like ‘dumb’, ‘pass’, ‘kick’, ‘idiot’ … as many words as I could think of as possible.
“And so what happens is, if someone writes a tweet with any of those words, I won’t ever see it. It’s the same on Instagram.
“The person who writes the posts sees it — but no one else does.
“For the last four years, I couldn’t tell you if I’ve copped something on social media because I don’t ever receive it.
“I would recommend that to every single athlete. Young, old … there’s ways to make it still be a fun, useful, interactive tool.
“I use social media in a positive way, to promote my brand and the sponsors that I work with.’’
Even the coaching vernacular has changed dramatically over the past 15 years.
On whiteboards in team dressing rooms, which list the daily training schedule and requirements, is the time when mobile phones must be switched off.
In the NFL, Arizona Cardinals head coach Kliff Kingsbury has started allowing “cell phone” breaks during team meetings just so his players can get their daily dose of social media.
“You start to see kind of hands twitching and legs shaking and you know they (players) need to get that social media fix, so we’ll let ’em hop over there and then get back in the meeting and refocus,” Kingsbury said last month.
Talk about feeding the addiction.
An addiction and a platform that can create so much pressure that, in order to protect his players, the coach of your favourite footy team is now willing to risk his own career.
Originally published as Blues star says social media is as damaging to NRL players’ careers as alcohol and gambling
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