New Arizona Cardinals head coach Kliff Kingsbury’s practice of allowing players regular cell phone breaks comes with a catch — he openly admits to using fake social media accounts in his previous role as head football coach at Texas Tech to monitor his players’ online activities, according to USA Today.
In an interview with The HawkCast in 2016, Kingsbury revealed that his staff would create avatars to check on the team. “We have fake accounts with cute girls that they add right now so we can see what’s going on, who’s tweeting what,” Kingsbury said. “Those are heavily monitored, for sure.”
New Arizona Cardinals head coach Kliff Kingsbury’s practice of allowing players regular cell phone breaks comes with a catch — he openly admits to using fake social media accounts in his previous role as head football coach at Texas Tech to monitor his players’ online activities, according to USA Today.
In an interview with The HawkCast in 2016, Kingsbury revealed that his staff would create avatars to check on the team. “We have fake accounts with cute girls that they add right now so we can see what’s going on, who’s tweeting what,” Kingsbury said. “Those are heavily monitored, for sure.”
While other coaches may regularly employ similar spying tactics, Kingsbury is unique in alerting his players to his covert surveillance. In the interview, he admitted the players were probably aware of the situation, but claimed they still couldn’t resist — “Friend requests from cute girls are an automatic follow,” he said.
If the players were not aware at the time, they were made aware when the coaches shared some of their best finds in the film room during the end-of-season meeting. “Once a year, we’ll capture the most absurd posts our team makes and we make a big presentation and have a lot of fun with it,” Kingsbury said.
