Nolan Smith, twitter, and how building a brand helped build a charity

Nolan Smith's story is one that has been told over and over again.

Derek Smith, Nolan's father, was a great basketball player three decades ago. He won a national title in 1980 with Louisville, cutting down the nets in the same city that Nolan did thirty years later with Duke. But when Nolan was eight, his father tragically passed away at the age of 34 on a cruise with his family.

The younger Smith persevered. With the aid of a strong support system -- his family and father's teammates and friends -- Nolan persevered. Using a tattoo of his father on his right arm as motivation, Nolan managed to work his way from backing up Greg Paulus to becoming the 23rd overall pick in the 2011 NBA Draft, ending up in Portland with the Trail Blazers.

But perhaps his greatest achievement will be his charity, the Sydney and Nolan Smith Foundation.


"Our foundation is for kids who lost a parent -- mother, father, guardian, any person who has been taking care of them their whole life," Smith said in a phone interview Monday night. "Its something that we can relate to, my sister and I. Its something that is very close to our hearts and its the reason why we started the foundation. We're very, very, very passionate about it, about changing kids lives who lost someone."

"We're going to be doing camps, dinners, all different things to just bring these kids together and let them get out their emotions. Let them see that there are other kids like them. And through myself and my sister, let them see that even without that loved one, you can still be successful and do positive things in your life."

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For quite possibly the first time since Renardo Sidney joined his program, I'm going to complement Mississippi State head coach Rick Stansbury.

In February of last season, Stansbury banned his his team from using twitter and suspended forward Ravern Johnson for a game after an outburst from Johnson on twitter. Following a loss in which he scored just 10 points in 40 minutes, Johnson referred to former teammates Twany Beckham and Elgin Bailey when he tweeted "Starting to see why people transfer you can play the minutes but not getting your talents shown because u watching someone else wit the ball the whole game shooters need to move not watch why other coaches get that do not make sense to me (sic)." Sidney retweeted what Johnson said, and it wasn't long before the blogosphere picked up on it and Johnson's tweets were all over every college hoops site on the internet.

Stansbury allowed his players back on twitter once the season ended, but that decision appears to have come back to bite him. Freshman guard DJ Gardner was kicked off the team after a string of profanity-laced tweets criticizing the Mississippi State coaching staff, in large part due to the fact that Gardner was upset for getting redshirted.

Stansbury, however, made the absolute correct decision in allowing his team back on twitter.

It wasn't the easy decision, mind you. If you are a coach of a college program, banning twitter is the simplest solution to what amounts to a complex problem. For a coach, the benefit received from allowing a group of college aged kids access to social media platforms is far outweighed by the risks involved. Whether its the Mississippi State players ripping their coaches, Scoop Jardine tweeting about basketball groupies, Tyshawn Taylor's facebook rant after fighting with the Kansas football team or Tyree Graham scooping the Rutgers Sports Information Department on his torn acl, its always going to be a point of concern for coaches when their players -- who are just as emotional and dramatic as you were in college -- have the ability to communicate with the world.

Living in the information age makes one slip-up -- one ill-advised moment of honesty, one tweet that was supposed to be a direct message, one frustrated tweet about playing time or number of shots or team success -- a topic on SportsCenter and a link on the front page of Yahoo!

Its so simple for a coaching staff to cut that issue off at the source, to restrict social media access for their players.

But banning an entire team because of the immaturity of a few is a mistake.


Following college athletes on twitter is fairly pointless. Generally speaking, they are tweeting about working out or playing ball, they are communicating with friends -- which is kind of what twitter was originally intended for -- and they are responding to fans, be it trash talk with rivals or retweets for their supporters. Every once in a while, to help support the notion that they truly are student-athletes, you'll see a tweet about a class that a player is enrolled in.

There are some truly terrific tweeters in the college basketball ranks, however, and they make being a fan of the program that much more fun.

Missouri senior Kim English is fairly well-known for his twitter prowess. Last summer, he made waves across the blogosphere when he translated the poem "If" by Rudyard Kipling -- line by line and tweet by tweet -- into basketball terms. Just last week, English, who has been dribbling a tennis ball around campus to try and improve his handle, tweeted for students to try and steal the ball from him if they saw him.

Jared Sullinger, Ohio State's sophomore center and all-american, found a sign that a Minnesota student made to mock him funny. After failing to get the sign from the student after the game, Sullinger was able to connect with the kid over twitter. That sign is currently hanging in Sullinger's mother's house.

North Carolina point guard Kendall Marshall has become the darling of the college hoops media in the last couple of days after tweeting out things like "Not a big fan of the expansion of the conferences in college sports. Feel like we're losing tradition." and "McDonalds tried to give me an extra BBQ sauce "on the house". I said no no, I wanna play this season."

Perhaps the best story of a college athlete on twitter comes from the Ivy League. Keith Wright is Harvard's center and currently the reigning Ivy Player of the Year. Throughout the season, he had been tweeting about a girl in his class that he had a crush on, the "section heroine". On the last day of classes, he live-tweeted the thought-process -- and nervousness -- of finally going up and asking her out. Unfortunately, she turned him down, but Wright survived. He's currently searching for "section heroine 2".

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Nolan Smith understands the pitfalls of social media. He knows the trouble that tweeting the wrong thing can get you into. Its something that Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski ingrained in his team from day one.

"Coach K trusted us to carry ourselves the right way," Smith said. "And if I was a college coach, that would be the first thing [I'd talk to my team about]. On the first day of team meetings, its something that you have to address. If you have facebook and twitter, be smart. Don't let people take pictures of you out at a party and put them on facebook. The same thing with twitter, don't go saying dumb stuff at three or four in the morning. They warned us about little stuff like that, and that one warning on the first day was all we needed."

College coaches should treat twitter as a privilege, because there are benefits to having their players accessible to fans. It allows the people outside the team -- the kids that wait in line for hours just to sit in the student section for a guarantee game or the boosters whose donations allow the coaches to travel in private jets to recruiting events -- a chance to really get to know the players they are cheering for. When used correctly, it helps build the program's brand.

"Twitter is who you are," Smith said. "If you don't want people to see you saying certain things, then leave it off of twitter."

"For college players, if they're on twitter and they're handling themselves the right way, they make [their school] look good. They make some fans say 'Duke has some really cool players, they connect with their fans.'"

That privilege can be taken away. There is nothing wrong with suspending a player's twitter usage or forcing them to open a new page, one that is private and only for use with friends and personal acquaintances. Anonymity is not difficult on the internet.

For the coaches that truly care about developing the kids in the program as people -- and not simply as basketball players -- than teaching the opportunities involved with building their own brand on twitter is just as important as engraining the principles of help-side defense in their heads.

Smith may never again reach the level of fame that he had as a national champion and player of the year candidate at Duke.

That's not a knock on him, either. When you're a star for the Blue Devils, you are one of the most recognizable faces in all of basketball. You play every game on national television, you have highlights on Sportscenter every morning and every 30 point outburst is going to get you talked about on by every college hoops scribe, be it on twitter or in an article. Even if he does becoming a starting point guard in the NBA -- which is certainly possible, assuming the NBA eventually ratifies a new CBA -- he'll never receive as much attention and publicity as he did the past two seasons at Duke.

The fact that he was one of the great stories in college basketball the last two years only magnified that fact.

Smith capitalized on his stardom in the collegiate ranks. He's friendly, funny and intelligent, on twitter and in person, and isn't shy about satiating the throng of fans he gets requesting retweets because its their birthday or because they love Duke or because their dogs have the same name, even if it comes at the cost of a clogged timeline or two. Its part of the reason that, as of this writing, he had over 51,000 twitter followers and a verified account.

That twitter presence allowed him a venue for announcing his foundation. With a couple of keystrokes and a click of his mouse, Smith instantly alerted his 51,000 followers to his newly established charity. That number only grows with you consider how many of those 51,000 followers retweeted his announcement.

"I think so," Smith said when I asked if his twitter following helped him launch his charity. "Ever since I've been on twitter, its helped me build my brand."

The Sydney and Nolan Smith Foundation is still in its infancy, and regardless of whether or not Nolan was on twitter, there is little doubt that the charity will be a successful one. But there is also little doubt that the exposure he received through social media at its launch will help to expedite that success.

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Twitter certainly is not for everyone.

As the saying goes, there are always a few bad apples that spoil the bunch. Whether its due to a lack of maturity on the player's part, a lack of understanding of the power of social media, or a lack of education on the downside of having a public profile, there are always going to be mistakes made on twitter.

Smith has some advice for college athletes that decide to get on twitter.

"Be smart. It shows the character and the class that you have, and if you don't have that, don't get on it. Twitter's not for you."