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GREENSBORO — Coaches can’t govern every aspect of their players’ lives, even when a basketball player blows a stack.

After a loss Feb. 21 at Duke, Virginia Tech forward Terrell Bell unloaded in a partially punctuated rant via Twitter.

“Ill fight every last one of dukes players and win!!!! One on one, line yall a** up! What’s up!”

When asked about it Monday, Virginia Tech coach Seth Greenberg said he didn’t know about Bell’s posts on the online social network.

Twitter relies on short one- or two-sentence missives that are immediately sent to everyone who has signed up to receive a person’s updates. And thousands of people have signed up to receive updates from players and coaches in the ACC.

Bell posted his update moments after the game. After Bell calmed, he posted another update in which he said he was just upset.

He wrote, “we not thugs at all, but we will play hard and win THE RIGHT WAY.”

Then his account switched from a setting that anyone can access to a private account that lets only people he authorizes see his comments.

“One of my favorite sayings is that good decisions are the result of experience, and experience is the result of bad decisions,” said Steve Shutt, assistant athletics director at Wake Forest.

A lot of the athletes on Twitter are young and prone to mistakes, he said. His office gives guidelines, not rules, on what athletes should post and say.

“Be very careful with what you do,” he said.

Shutt gave an example of Twitter gone bad. Idaho forward Kashif Watson recently was suspended after posting updates critical of basketball head coach Don Verlin.

“Seems to me that Twitter gets more people into trouble than it does good,” Shutt said.

Several ACC coaches said that players in general have the freedom to say what they wish and are given guidelines — not rules — on what can be said online.

Though in a place where a one-line shot can be heard ’round the World Wide Web, UNC coach Roy Williams gives his players a word of caution.

“When you put something out there, it’s not sending a letter to your Aunt Mary,” he said. “You’re sending a letter to everyone out there.”

Players usually post updates about the stuff one would expect from college-age men, with plenty of non sequiturs. They also gab about practice, other players or games, but they usually don’t veer into trade secrets of their teams. What they say:

• UNC forward Marcus Ginyard (7,000 followers) often posts about recent naps.
• UNC guard Larry Drew II (3,100 followers) recently had a hankerin’ for Roscoe’s House of Chicken ’n Waffles, a Los Angeles-area chain.
• Duke forward Nolan Smith (5,200 followers) was bummed when someone hit his car Sunday .

Coaches are even in the game, though some may not post Twitter updates (also called tweets) by themselves. A student manager for Paul Hewitt at Georgia Tech prompts the coach and then loads responses under Hewitt’s account. “I wouldn’t know how to upload it,” Hewitt said Monday.

When his team went 3-4 in February games, Hewitt aimed tweets at naysayers.

“Are you a critic or a supporter of this team? Supporters will continue to watch this team fight,” Hewitt’s Twitter feed read Feb. 24.

The coach has more than 860 followers.

The Twitter site is a mosh pit of names and personalities, used by millions. Film critic Roger Ebert is active on the site, as is pop rocker John Mayer.

And there’s the occasional college hoops player just waking from a nap.

As for punctuation?

That’s often sacrificed for brevity. Twitter allows only 140 characters per update.

“Slept thru class...OH WELL,” Ginyard wrote recently. “Time for weights and practice.”

Contact Gerald Witt at 373-7008 or gerald.witt@news-record.com