Coach Kerry McCoy has his own Twitter account and personal website.
Last week, the Terrapins wrestling team won a share of the ACC regular-season title. Next week, it will travel to Chapel Hill, N.C., for the ACC Championships.
This week, it changed its profile picture and asked its 4,090 Facebook fans and 1,412 Twitter followers to join them there.
With an active, engaging and oftentimes random social media strategy, coach Kerry McCoy and his staff have created an Internet presence akin to a D-list celebrity. On a daily basis, a wide mix of colleagues, fans, friends and family are treated to small bytes of information ranging from live updates during matches (pictures included) to announcements of birthdays, betrothals and babies.
“Our Internet presence is supporting other organizations and getting ourselves out there,” McCoy said. “You know, someone has a birthday, someone gets a job, someone gets promoted, all that stuff. It’s multifaceted. The biggest thing for us is to just be out there.”
Some of this week’s posts from the @UMDWrestling Twitter account include words of congratulations to Brenda Frese and her women’s basketball team for a victory over Duke; a retweet of university President Wallace Loh congratulating Johns Hopkins on its 136th birthday; and an inspirational quote from Assistant Athletics Director Carrie Blankenship: “A good leader is one whom will inspire people to see what they can be, rather than what they are.”
And, just yesterday at about 4 p.m., “The Official Maryland Wrestling Page” — quotations included in the official name — uploaded 58 new photos to the “Untitled Album,” a compilation of pictures of family members, cheerleaders, Testudo and some wrestling action.
Redshirt sophomore Jimmy Sheptock said the team’s Internet presence is essential to developing and sustaining a fan base in a niche sport.
“A lot of fans outside of the sport, if they like the page, they can see when the matches are and come to matches and see us wrestle,” Sheptock said. “Everything nowadays is through multimedia, so it helps get what we’re doing out to the other fans out there.”
With its regular updates and offbeat topics, the wrestling team’s online profile far outstrips that of some fellow Terps programs. The gymnastics team has 981 Facebook likes, the swimming and diving team 464 and the softball team 761.
But for McCoy, it doesn’t stop at Facebook.
The coach himself has 1,343 followers on his own personal Twitter account (@kmac120), where he, like the team’s account, congratulated coach Mark Turgeon and the men’s basketball team for a Tuesday night win and announced the Terps gymnastics team’s final winning score Saturday.
On top of his own Twitter account, McCoy also has a personal website at www.kerrytherealmccoy.com. The two-time Olympian and two-time NCAA champion’s site touts self-written essays of his accomplishments and wrestling videos and even hawks T-shirts with his name and picture for sale.
“I actually started my site when I was competing,” McCoy said. “I started it as a way for fundraising and for my followers to follow what I was doing. This was all before blogging and before Facebook and Twitter.”
McCoy added that he hasn’t updated his site since he was given the Terps’ coaching job almost four years ago.
And although he isn’t sure how many views his personal webpage gets daily, McCoy’s satisfied with how many people are seeing his Facebook and Twitter updates every day.
“We have a pretty good following,” McCoy said. “A lot of our followers are the other coaches and other sports teams here and everyone retweets each other. We’re not super active in a sense that we haven’t done Twitter chat lines and all that stuff, but everything we do is on our Twitter and on our Facebook, so that’s where we’re getting the younger crowd.”
egan@umdbk.com
