On Saturday, January 22, the AIC women’s basketball team fell to a 6-8 record after taking on the 9-4 Bentley Falcons. The Yellow Jackets lost the game, 91-43. As if the loss was not enough to deal with, immediately following the game’s conclusion, the AIC Athletics social media team posted a graphic to Twitter, which they do for all the athletics on campus. Only this time, it appeared that the graphic was posted not only to inform those who follow the team of the results, but also to poke fun at the team, to disrespect them, and ultimately to make matters worse for the team following the loss.

“Welp, someone send dog pics…” the caption of the post said. “Final score– Bentley: Too many/ AIC: not enough.”

Unfortunately that wasn’t the end of it. Following the caption came the graphic featuring an upset Will Smith meme (which is extremely popular across social media). Smith was depicted wearing an AIC basketball next to the score of the game. Also included in the graphic was the term “spain,” which also is a very popular meme or saying that floats around social media. The term refers to the “I’m in Spain but the ‘S’ is silent” meme whenever someone is describing a negative occurrence that might have taken place in their lives at any given point.

The now deleted tweet quickly spread throughout the AIC community for multiple hours following the game’s conclusion with most people screenshotting the tweet and sending it amongst friends, teammates, as well as others. Shortly after it was posted, the tweet made its way back to members of the women’s basketball team, who responded promptly.

“#OneHiveOneFamily huh?” Graduate senior guard Nyrie Holliman said, questioning and mocking one of the school’s many mottos. There were two other responses as well, but they were deleted by the time anyone was able to view the rest. Another response that followed was, “That’s rude as hell…” from an unknown user on snapchat. It was clear that the post had crossed a line, which resulted in the post being deleted from the page shortly after the turmoil that erupted. But in spite of all of the re-shares and the slight controversy the tweet caused, it was not addressed by anyone affiliated with AIC athletics or the social media pages at any point.

In an attempt to get ahold of anyone that might have been in charge of or responsible for the AIC Athletics social media accounts, I unfortunately came up short of any response from anyone that I reached out to.

Since this event took place during the weekend of January 22, the AIC athletics division has not posted any similar content to their social media pages; other teams that play in the winter have also had games in the past week. Because I was not able to get in contact with anybody for a further explanation of what led up to the post and graphics being created and released in general there was not much for me to cover.

It has been about a week since the initial incident occurred. Since then the women’s basketball team has had three games scheduled, but has only been able to play two of them. They went 1-1 with the first game after the game against Stonehill College was canceled, suffered a close 6-point loss to Queens College, and secured a dominant 15-point win against St. Michael’s College. The team has nine regular season games left. Five of them are at home. Their next match up comes on Thursday, February 3rd at 5:30 against Adelphi University at Butova Gymnasium.