KELOWNA, B.C. – A member of the UBC Okanagan Heat coaching team may still be in hot water after making comments on social media regarding the B.C. teachers vote Thursday night.
While Matt Heyworth’s tweets to Premier Christy Clark may have been viewed as off-side by some, his boss says the messages were based on his own judgments, not those of UBC-Okanagan.
“He wasn’t speaking on behalf of the university,” says Rob Johnson, UBC Okanagan Director of Athletics & Recreation.
Johnson confirmed Heyworth, a varsity basketball assistant coach at the Okanagan campus, still had his job Friday but deferred answering the question if Heyworth would still have a job at the university Monday.
The first tweet to the Premier Thursday evening from Heyworth’s account @mattheyworth said, “Shut Up…”.
It was followed by “Can we have a re-vote with “assassination” as option 3? #bced”
The comments were followed by on-line criticism, with some users telling him to delete the tweet if he valued his job.
Heyworth responded, “nope I’m good”.
And followed up with “Autocorrect how did you get “assassination” from “arbitration’? Silly iPhone”.
Johnson noted the on-line comments were removed “quite quickly” after they were made, saying, “It’s important for it to be dealt with by the individual responsible for it.”
“It was a very emotional issue that people were discussing,” says Johnson of the teachers vote on a deal to end the labour dispute at B.C. public schools.
Johnson admitted he had very little experience dealing with issues of social media and his staff, but said UBC-Okanagan allows people to have social media accounts with views expressed based on the individuals own judgment.
A spokesperson from Premier Christy Clark’s office issued this statement about the incident: “We are aware of the tweet but our focus remains on getting kids back to class on Monday.”
Heyworth did not respond to Global Okanagan’s request for an interview Friday.
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