Coaches use social media to show they have a human side, too, as well as discuss basketball and promote their programs. @TUCoachLane photo

One morning, Brian Lane pulled out his phone and conducted a social media experiment. After uncovering a rejection letter from Mike Krzyzewski when the current Transylvania men's coach applied to become a graduate assistant at Duke, he decided to tweet it to his followers and the man who beat him out.

“Who would have thought I would have gotten beaten out at Duke by @jaybilas,” Lane tweeted.

Soon after, his self-deprecation extrapolated across the Twittersphere.

“I look up an hour later and he had tweeted it to his hundreds of thousands of followers,” Lane said of the ESPN analyst, who currently has more than 430,000 followers.

Coaches across the Division III landscape are beginning to branch out into the ever-expanding world of social media, although some are still hesitant (perhaps paranoid) about giving away too many of the secrets of their success and some simply retweet simple motivational platitudes.

And then there are the likes of Lane (@TUCoachLane), Rhode Island men's coach Bob Walsh (@CoachBobWalsh), Pitt-Bradford women's coach Patrick Daniel (@CoachPDaniel), and Rosemont men's coach Bobby Hughes (@CoachBarney), among others, who have wholeheartedly embraced the idea of informing, engaging, inspiring, and entertaining in 140-character bursts that blend refreshing bursts about basketball, humor, even life in general that appeal to recruits and casual fans alike. (See our list of favorite Twitter feeds below.)

“At the end of the day, I believe it's OK to not speak in coachspeak,” said Hughes, the first-year bench boss at Rosemont after previously serving as an assistant at Washington College and Drew. “It's OK to have other interests and it's OK to talk about other interests. Some coaches think if you're not talking basketball it's a weakness. I view it as a strength.”

Hughes first joined the Twittersphere in 2009, when a political friend implored him to join — and would not hang up the phone until he set up an account. Almost four years later, he is tweeting about going to the local Wawa four times a week for lunch, hours after his Ravens snapped a 10-game losing skid Wednesday night.

Slowly and steadily, coaches are embracing the concept of sharing more of their personalities on Twitter, allowing us to see life outside of the character stalking the sideline in suit and tie. While Hughes runs a rigid practice, he also mentions his passion for golfing, the Jersey Shore, and the Philadelphia Phillies are fixtures among his missives.

Almost two years ago, Hughes met his fiancee inadvertently through Twitter. Let us explain: Through getting to know Mike Meech, who runs the Phillies' blog “Blog of Fame,” he attended a pregame tailgate where he was the first arrival. The second? His soon-to-be-wife, Carolyn Schaffling.

Using the soft side of velcro to erase a white board is one of the cooler "benefits" of being a basketball coach.

— Bobby Hughes(@CoachBarney) January 28, 2013

More than marital connections, Twitter has helped the likes of Daniel, Lane, and Walsh build and further develop followings at their respective institutions. Both Daniel and Hughes are in their first season of establishing their footprint. Coaches overuse the term culture when discussing the importance of setting a tone within their ranks, but both have done especially noteworthy jobs of getting their campuses excited about the work they are doing.

When Daniel met with the Pitt-Bradford marketing department, they discussed his willingness to engage in social media. While most coaches only use Facebook for personal use, they use Twitter to blend church and state — or in this case, their basketball and personal lives.

After tweeting Wednesday night about Facetiming with his baby girl, he tweeted the video stream link and his personal thoughts about an eventual 81-47 victory over Hilbert being a “MUST” win beforehand, then posted recaps from D3hoops.com and the Pitt-Bradford athletics site. Often, other campus Twitter accounts retweet him and he does the same with them, developing and building a following in the process. (Several schools, including Transylvania and NYU, are especially good at Tweeting support between athletics and other departments.)

“One thing we want to do here is we want to generate more interest not only for women's basketball, but (our) other teams,” said Daniel, who was previously an assistant at Kenyon. “I see it as a positive when (his tweets) are being retweeted.

“My goal is to generate excitement for our women's basketball team. If there's anything I can do to generate more interest in our women's basketball team, I'm going to do that.”

Among the Division III coaches, no one has generated more buzz through each of his 140-character thoughts than Rhode Island College's Bob Walsh, who has attracted more than 1,500 followers because of his insights on every intricacy imaginable within the game.

Businesses could learn more than a pick-and-roll from Walsh's social media model. He will retweet relevant links, discuss what he sees in both Rhode Island's and Division I games, pick a point such as not forgetting about a player just because he is “low maintenance,” then use it to draw traffic to his insightful blog, blog.coachbobwalsh.com.

When he sat down with D3sports.com publisher Pat Coleman last Thursday, Walsh summed up his thoughts on embracing social media by explaining how often he hears from other coaches via Twitter and because of his blog posts about coaching strategies, including his philosophy of fouling when his Anchormen lead by three late in the game.

“Social media is so easy today. You can get information all over the place,” Walsh said, adding, “It makes you sort of think the game more. It makes you put (information) into a concise way delivering it, which helps you as a coach. It's a lot of fun.”

At Transylvania, Lane has a weekly TV show broadcast statewide in the hoops haven of Kentucky. However, like only a select few of his brethren, he will post pictures from the TV set, the locker room, even outside the White House which his team visited in November en route to playing in the inaugural Hoopsville National Invitational Classic. (His Twitter avatar is a photo outside the White House with his son.)

As much as a phone call, text message or campus visit can offer a degree of insight into a coach's personality, Lane's feed showcases his humor (a mix of wit and self-deprecation), his connections (Kentucky coach John Calipari tweeted his father, former Transylvania coach Don Lane, a happy birthday), and his support for the other teams at Transy.

Not to mention show a different side to his personality that his 1,400-plus followers appreciate.

“Most people who know me know that I have a very serious side when it comes to coaching, but I can also have fun and be a jokester,” Lane said. “I think my players see both sides.”

Which is the biggest factor of all, first with recruiting — coaches have prospective student-athletes following them in an attempt to decipher who they are really dealing with — and then once they begin matriculating.

“The recruits need to see that. They need to know who Coach Hughes is, who Bob Hughes is,” Hughes said. “If I'm misrepresenting that and they come play for me, it's not going to be a truthful relationship. I can't be one of the coaches with the slicked-back hair and the fast talker because that's not who I am.”

Actively tweeting coaches tend to get a lot of Twitter support from athletic departments and the schools as a whole, such as this sign tweeted by Pitt-Bradford's athletics handle from @CoachPDaniel's office door.

Added Daniel: “It's just another kind of way to help in your communication and see another side of your program. It's a conversation-builder type of deal. Maybe there's a bit more interest than I thought (from a recruit). Yes there's been phone calls, yes there's been text messages, but if they saw you on Twiter, that's a positive thing.”

More and more coaches are becoming open to the idea of sharing through Twitter, even as some might become more hesitant. Whether it is Daniel, Hughes, Lane, or Walsh, they often hear from other coaches about how to get started and how to go about both controlling and establishing their message. Although it is a social medium best served for open books such as the aforementioned coaches, it can also be a powerful and productive tool for any coach to expand his or her audience.

“It can be an asset, it can be a burden. It can be whatever you choose to do,” Lane said. “It can be halfway and not be good, or you can embrace it and try to use it as a vehicle to get your message out whatever your team is doing. It could be community service, it could be highlighting a player, it could be a behind the scenes.

“I do it in a way that I'm trying to give people something they don't already know.”