Personally, my stomach turns at almost all softball social media content. I'm sure 90% is created by parents, and it's always the same humble brag BS.

At the same time, it appears to be effective - X is used by almost every college program and it's one of the few ways pre-contact aged kids can get a sense of who might be interested in them (likes and follows).

In other sports, posting your offers and interest is the norm - football, but even women's basketball. It's interesting that you rarely see softball players post their offers like that (e.g., "BLESSED to received my seventh D1 offer! #Blessed #HardWorkPays #D1Dreams #ScriptureCitation").

But something about the 9/1 posts hit me as especially gross. There are lots of kids who went to bed with broken hearts that night because of the false expectations created about phones ringing all night. You'd think the parents would chill out with showing their kid on the phone with pages of notes. Plus, unless you're gonna go all in on the tactic of trying to create scarcity demand by listing the names of the schools who contacted you, what are you really accomplishing?

We'd all be better off without social media. Because Pandora is outta that box, best we can do is try to give our kids perspective and hope, and encourage them to follow their path - not the BS digital world.