Twitter, the popular social-media platform, is a staple in intercollegiate athletics. Although it is often regarded merely as a pastime, Twitter boasts advantages and disadvantages to college student athletes and their programs. This is primarily due to the nature of interactions and exchanges that take place between student athletes and the general public, be they fans, critics, or somewhere in between. Using a semistructured protocol, the researchers conducted a 75-min focus-group interview with 7 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I student athletes to examine the psychological impacts of Twitter use. A modified version of consensual qualitative research was used for data analysis. Results indicated that student athletes were heavily influenced and affected by Twitter use across various domains in their lives. Participants reflected on both advantages (e.g., avenue for advocacy and moral support and promoting team cohesion) and disadvantages (e.g., receipt of critical tweets and detrimental performance implications) of using the microblogging platform, thereby corroborating extant literature and providing a more balanced perspective of Twitter’s resulting impact. The researchers explicated practical implications including improved social-media training and the development of best practices to support student athletes in their responsible use of Twitter. Further research is necessary to better understand the differences in experiences of student athletes competing in revenue-generating sports compared with those competing in non-revenue-generating sports.

Despite the role of working memory capacity (WMC) in decision making, there is a dearth of empirical literature concerned with working memory and how it relates to tactical decision making in sport. The temporal occlusion paradigm has often been used by sport researchers to improve tactical decision making and, thus, provides a well-established foundation for creating decision-making trainings. Therefore, the purpose of the current study was to explore the implementation of computer-based learning modules to improve the tactical decision making of four high school quarterbacks with varying levels of WMC, utilizing a single-subject, multiple baseline design. The learning modules utilized a temporal occlusion paradigm and present a novel intervention aimed at improving decision making in quarterbacks. Data were analyzed using visual analysis and improvement rate difference (IRD). Overall, results did not demonstrate a causal relationship between changes in accuracy of decision making after implementation of the learning modules but did provide moderate evidence for improvement in reaction time for decision making due to the learning modules. The learning modules were met with positive perceptions from the four participants, and the participant with the lowest WMC showed evidence of improvement in both accuracy and speed of decision making. Limitations as well as implications will be discussed.