For many high school-age athletes, the immediate gratification of social media has made traditional media and their websites as relevant as cassette tapes and rotary-dial telephones.

Nowhere is it more obvious than in the world of high school basketball, where for those under age 25, it’s all about the highlight reel.

Specifically, videos of players dunking and doing exceptional things on the court, often accompanied by headlines that create a sense of breathless urgency.

“Matchup Of The Year!!! Chet Holmgren Drops A Triple-Double!’’ read one of several such video links last week after a regular-season game between
Holmgren’s Minnehaha Academy and Minneapolis North.

Easy to dismiss as pure hype, the videos have become the currency of high school and AAU basketball, often drawing thousands of views and elevating youth basketball stars to prominence on a national stage.

Social media video sites such as Overtime, Who’s Next, Slam!, Courtside Films, BallisLife and locally based FreshCoastHoops have proliferated in recent years, fueled by a seemingly endless taste for basketball highlights among young users of YouTube, Instagram or Snapchat.

“I don’t read the newspaper. My parents follow that more,” said Jayven Williamson, a Minnehaha Academy senior. “I follow Overtime and sites like that.”

No need to Google a favorite player for the latest. A subscription to one of these sites, typically free, delivers its product directly to cellphones and tablets, where the best ones are shared and reshared among the masses and often go viral.

“It’s because it’s all videos,” Williamson’s teammate Nick Parten said. “It’s targeted toward a younger audience.”

A top high school player in Minnesota can develop a significant national following after just one spectacular dunk or behind-the-back pass. Last season, heavy coverage of Jalen Suggs and Paige Bueckers led to both developing Instagram accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers. Both were almost as well known nationally as they were locally before they played their first college game.

“I’m definitely a millennial: I do not read newspapers,” said Holmgren, the 7-1 Redhawks forward. “I get a lot of my information from the internet, from ESPN articles or social media. My mom and dad and grandma, they read newspapers.”

Holmgren is Exhibit A for a player whose reputation exploded as a result of a video gone viral. Already a Division I prospect, his profile went national two summers ago while attending Steph Curry’s SC30 Select Camp in California.

During a scrimmage, with Curry guarding him outside the lane, Holmgren got Curry off-balance with a crossover, blew by him with a behind-the-back dribble, slashed to the basket and finished with a two-handed dunk.

Up to that point, most who looked at Holmgren saw him as a typical big, a low-post, back-to-the basket type. Seeing him show off skills many had never seen before from someone his size helped elevate him to the position he now occupies as the No. 1 high school recruit in the nation.

The clip also led many to ignore some of the most significant parts of his game.

“That’s kind of the negative part. A lot of people who learned who Chet is learned it from a clip as opposed to learning about his whole game,” local basketball analyst Ryan James said. “The way Chet affects a game on defense at every position is amazing. He’s the best shot-blocker I’ve ever seen. But people don’t see that.”

Which spotlights one of the drawbacks of dependence on highlight videos to assess players. They tend to emphasize the wow-factor. Rarely does one include a top player’s defensive lapse or poor fundamentals.

“The unfortunate reality is, no one makes a bad highlight tape,” said former Gopher Randy Carter, an assistant coach at Minnehaha Academy whose son, Chase, is being recruited at the Division I level. “When you put a highlight tape out there, everyone looks good. It gives kids a false sense that they may be better than they are.”

David Holmgren, Chet’s father, summed it up: “The videos will get you noticed, but they won’t keep you on the court.”

Minneapolis North boys’ coach Larry McKenzie  believes the videos encourage playing to the camera and not for their teams.

“Kids start playing for highlights and they don’t make good decisions,” he said. “They want to cross over and go between their legs two, three times and get a dunk. These videos give those plays exposure, and kids start looking at things like that.”

While some video sites, such as FreshCoastHoops, will post longer, 10- to 12-minute full-game recaps, they have less broad appeal and tend to draw fans of specific teams.

“All I see is shooting threes and getting dunks,” McKenzie lamented. “I’ve never seen a kid locking anybody up defensively. Even if it’s blocking a shot, it’s always about guys that do it with flair, not a guy playing sound defense.”

McKenzie’s feelings are not uncommon in coaching circles, but others see a benefit in the videos.

“Highlight clips can be good,” James said. “A college coach wants to get a look at a player, he puts a kid’s name in and bang, there’s a video. Those two-minute clips are helping get the kid’s foot in the door.”

Overtime, one of the biggest sites, counts high-profile names including Carmelo Anthony and Kevin Durant as stakeholders. Recently, the company announced plans to start a developmental basketball league, offering players age 16 to 18 an alternative to college and dangling $100,000 contracts as a lure.

Some see it as a natural progression of organized basketball, offering an option to players who may not be collegiate types and avoiding the hypocrisy of using players who either aren’t prepared for or aren’t interested in pursuing a college education.

“The world is constantly changing and players aren’t looking at the traditional paths as much,” said Prince Aligbe, Minnehaha Academy’s highly sought-after 6-7 junior forward. “First it was going straight from high school to the pros, then it was playing overseas, then it’s the G-League. I’m a more traditional dude, but it might be right for some players.”

Others see Overtime’s new league as exploitive, taking advantage of naive young men.

“A hundred-thousand is chump change,” Dave Holmgren said. “After taxes and living expenses, it’s not as much as you think it is. And what about college? If they don’t make it and want to go to college, now they can’t because they’ve taken money.”

McKenzie said the new league would significantly target and exploit young men of color.

“It’s going to ruin a lot of kids, especially Black and brown kids,” he said. “Most of the kids this league is going to take advantage of are inner-city kids who don’t have much. They would probably be headed for a junior college because they don’t like school and just want to play basketball. It’s a short-term decision and those kids are not going to have a lot of options when they’re done.”

However the new league plays out, it’s evident that the influence of social media sites on basketball will continue to grow.

“It’s a generational thing,” Aligbe said. “Times change. Thirty years ago, people barely had the internet. Everybody has to adjust.”