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At the stroke of midnight, Maddie Ford Hansen's new job began.
The director of Utah football's digital media sorted through the Twitter accounts of Utah's recruits early Monday morning and retweeted them — a somewhat laborious process. Within an hour and a half, the Utah football Twitter account had retweeted 41 recruits, including five already committed to the Utes.
If you get notifications for every Utah football tweet, your phone was blowing up.
"It was kind of a blitz," she said. "But it should kind of even out now."
The Twitter avalanche marked a new NCAA rule going into effect that coaches and official Twitter accounts can now like and retweet recruit tweets. Utah football was hardly the only sport from the department in on the action, and other schools were retweeting at midnight as well.
The new Twitter guideline seems to cut against the NCAA's other media rules regarding recruits, chiefly that coaches and school officials can't discuss them publicly. And yet, when a coach retweets a potential recruit, is he or she not publicizing a recruit?
"It was a little bit of a shock to us that they decided to do this," Hansen said. "But I think it's cool; also, I think it's exciting. And our fans are definitely going to jump all over this."
Coach Kyle Whittingham said he isn't much personally involved with the Twitter blitz, but he has delegated his assistants to retweet and like posts that they deem appropriate. Each coach is free to retweet the recruits he coaches.
"I'm far from a social media expert: I don't understand a lot of it," he said. "But I understand that it plays a vital role in recruiting. The key is that we're keeping current and maximizing all the things that are now allowable."
There are some odd catches to the rule that coaches must watch out for: They can't retweet or like posts in which third parties, such as scouting services, are tagged or mentioned. They can't type a message of their own to talk to or quote a recruit.
The new system may cause some recruits to put too much weight into how much attention a school is or isn't paying to him or her, Hansen said, and at times could hamper recruiting efforts.
"We want them to know we care about them and we like them," she said. "But the rule in some ways has gotten a little more challenging. If an athlete tags rivals and employees, we can't retweet that, and they might be upset because they don't know the rules. I really worry about that. It's an easy thing to overlook."
The Utes' social media team is preparing for camp on Aug. 4 just like the rest of the program. They'll have players Brandon Cox, Andy Phillips and Isaac Asiata running accounts on Wednesday, then be prepared to cover fall camp on Twitter, Snapchat, Periscope and Facebook.
Out for camp
Whittingham said Monday that several Utes won't be ready to participate in fall camp starting this week. Running back Sam Whittingham, defensive back Damian Greene and lineman Scott Peck all had offseason injuries that should keep them out of practice for "several months" this season. Typically the team does not discuss specifics of injuries.
All other players should take part in camp, Whittingham said, though some will be limited by what he termed "nagging" injuries.
Twitter: @kylegoon