Tagovailoa, other rookies give insight to local players

Since 2011, the Miami Dolphins have been hosting South Florida high school football players for High School Football Media Day.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, this year’s media day date was moved up and moved online. The Dolphins hosted the virtual event on their website Wednesday.

The event included seminars on financial literacy, social media tips, nutrition and diversity. Nearly all of the Dolphins’ rookies, including quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, participated in the event.

“High School Media Day — what makes it great is the kids come to the stadium, the media gets to interview them [and] tell their stories, and they get to feel like they’re at the SEC or ACC or one of the Big 10 media days and it becomes a special event,” said Twan Russell, the Dolphins’ senior director of community affairs.

“So we were brainstorming: How can we still make this special for the kids knowing we can’t bring them to us?”

Russell, who also coaches linebackers at St. Thomas Aquinas High, hosted the event and asked the Dolphins players questions about what they’ve learned about managing money, their eating habits, diversity and how they handle social media.

“I liked the fact that Coach Russell and them were talking about the word ‘privilege,’ ” St. Thomas linebacker Jaydon Hood said. “As a Black man, when I hear the word ‘privilege,’ I think of other races’ privileges. But sometimes I forget that I have privileges too. Maybe it’s not the same, but it’s similar and I just have to realize that.”

Hood said he liked the way the media day was organized and how the Dolphins players were involved.

“I loved the way the NFL players, the rookies, they gave their insight and

explained how they did things,” Hood said.

Russell said teams and players from around the area registered for Wednesday’s online event, and he thinks hundreds were watching.

“We had about 600 kids registered, but you had some instances where schools registered and said, ‘Hey, we’re going to watch it as a group,’ ” Russell said. “So they Zoomed in and then the coach shared the screen with the rest of the team because they wanted to watch it as a team. So it’s going to be hard to tell.

“I believe it’s going to be well over 1,000 high school students, but I don’t know if we’ll ever know exactly how many.”

Russell said the Dolphins rookies were enthusiastic when presented with the idea of speaking to high school players.

“The guys were excited,” Russell said. “We had the whole meeting on it a week ago. The guys asked questions, they were

very engaged, they were very excited about [it]. That was the part, for me, that I was like, ‘You know what? This is going to be OK.’ ”

Tagovailoa participated in the session, addressing social media. He discussed seeing critical posts about him.

“For me, going through that in college, it’s really however much you decide to go on social media, first off,” Tagovailoa said. “If you’re on that thing every time, you’re obviously going to see whatever anyone says. If you’re someone that likes to post just to post because you like the likes or you like the comments, you’re going to see that.

“There’s been instances where I’ve run into a lot of them. But I guess the structure that I’ve had growing up, it’s been easy to deal with things like that. Having the structure of my family and then our faith as well, that’s what’s helped me not worry about those kinds of things.”

Tagovailoa also singled out Tik Tok, the video platform, as his favorite social media to use.

“You don’t know it,” he said, “but you’re on that thing for five hours.”

Tagovailoa