Play hard. Tweet often.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: Viewpoint essay

Heard from jay Cutler the other day. Good to catch up. That new comedy flick, "Couples Retreat"? Jay saw it a few weeks back, during bye week. Gave it the thumbs-up. "Check it out," Jay suggested. So I might.

We keep in touch now and then, Jay and I. Sort of like you keep in touch with a kid who's away at college. The occasional text update, a few brief words on what's up. First week of October, Jay lets me know things are cool. "Just watched some Detroit film," he tells me. "Trying to find some dinner."

So yeah, we talk now and then. Although it's really Jay who sort of dominates the conversation. I mostly listen. Same with my man Carmelo. I pretty much let him set the agenda. "You gotta catch that pass," 'Melo offers up the other night, during the Packers-Vikings game. I shake my head in lament, too, because he's right: You do have to catch that pass. Whichever pass that may be, because at the time I'm not exactly watching the game.

But I am tuned in to the latest crack in the proscenium arch that used to separate the sports audience from the athlete: the Tweet. Finally, it seems, we've discovered the proper use for the worldwide lattice of computer networks known as the Internet. And that is to know what the University of Colorado's football coach, Dan Hawkins, has on his to-do list for the day. "Watching special teams film," wrote coach Hawk through his Twitter account a few weeks ago. And the world could rest just a bit easier.

To the list of odd but arresting pop-culture phenomena like Girls Gone Wild and animals that attack, we now can add Athletes Who Tweet (AWT). There are hundreds of them out there, including a handful of notable Colorado sports figures who regularly spurt out abbreviated diary entries of their daily routine via Twitter.com, the hugely popular yet somewhat mystifying Web platform for sharing life's minutiae with perfect strangers.

You can find them with just a small bit of typing and hunting at Twitter.com, or you can get a neatly packaged listing of AWT participants at www.athletetweets.com. It's there where I've bonded with the likes of Champ Bailey ("what up twitterland ... going on Jim Rome in 30 mins."), Carmelo Anthony ("Just got to China. The longest flight in the history of flying, especially when you don't go to sleep not once"), and CU's Hawkins, who so far in my brief exposure to AWT gets the award for least-compelling-yet-grammatically-perfect...