Twitter-fueled prom dates aren’t so cute anymore, some say

A high school football player in Kentucky is taking his coach’s fiancee to the prom this year.

Last year Detroit Pistons player Andre Drummond showed up for one Detroit girl’s prom in a Porsche and Louis Vuitton shoes.

And a sports anchor in Hagerstown, Md. went to prom with a high school boy.

Thanks, Twitter.

For several seasons now, high-schoolers have used Twitter campaigns to score prom dates with celebrities and other famous folks. Now they’re using retweets to win dates with each other.

I’ll go to prom with you for 10,000 retweets.

Last month Grayson Blevins, a football player at Mercer County Senior High in Kentucky, jokingly asked his assistant coach whether he could take the coach’s fiancee to prom if he could score 1,000 retweets.

Coach Charlie Cox and his fiancee, Chelsea Bemiss, laughed and went along.

Grayson, though, wasn’t kidding. He got 70 retweets in the first five minutes and hit the 1,000 mark in little more than a day.

“That’s on me for underestimating the power of social media and the resilience of my kids, to be honest with you,” Cox told WKYT. “I didn’t think in a million years he’d get 1,000 retweets, much less do so in like 28 hours.”

So now Cox and his fiancee are ironing out the details for prom night, April 23. Cox joked that he might ask Taylor Swift to join them.

Raquel Smith, a senior last year at West Bloomfield High School in Michigan, used a similar Twitter campaign to score a date with the Pistons’ Drummond.

The NBA player became the unofficial king of prom, hanging out at the party for two hours and taking photos with students and staff.

A few months before prom Raquel tweeted a promposal to Drummond, 21. He said he would go if she could get 12,000 retweets.

Welp, guess what?

Last year when student athlete Cole Stotler asked Dorian Craft, the sports director for WHAG in Hagerstown, Md., if she would go to prom if he could get 5,000 retweets, she figured why not.

“I really didn’t think that Cole could reach 5,000 retweets — Hagerstown is a pretty small city,” Craft said.

Ah, but Twitter is a universe.

She had fun picking out that prom dress.

Teens who manage to grab the national spotlight for their campaign have the best luck. Last month Dan Crawford at BustedCoverage.com asked his national audience to help high-schooler Stephen Bieber get a prom date with NFL cheerleader Christa Aiken.

It took less than a week.

“For once, social media strangers have done something good. This kid gets to impress his high school bros with a knockout prom date,” Crawford wrote. “Be on the lookout for the limo, Christa.”

But a backlash is brewing to Twitter promposals.

For instance last prom season Billboard begged teens to stop asking celebrities to go to prom.

“It was cute at first. Arguably even a novel idea. But like so many ideas that spring from the Internet, it’s time we let this come to a close — gracefully, quietly and without a struggle,” Billboard wrote.

“There are a number of things that are strange and awkward about asking an adult you don’t personally know to a high school dance. But the real problem isn’t so much the invite — it’s the public nature of the request.

“The entire point is to create an online campaign and get enough people involved so that the artist in question feels pressured to respond.”

Not only that, but campaigning to go to prom with your English teacher? Aren’t there — shouldn’t there be — rules about that?

Some teens also think it’s demeaning that some of their peers are setting retweet quotas as a condition to saying yes to prom.

Can we get a RT on that?