An Ex-Coach’s Spirited Ascent of a 140-Character Soapbox

After winning 648 games as a Division I coach, Tom Penders now retreats to a winter home in Miami during college basketball season.

Much to the chagrin of his wife, Susie Penders, his evenings are rarely spent enjoying the fruits of retirement near South Beach. Instead, Penders sits in front of a television with a laptop close by so that he can continually fire off 140 or fewer characters throughout the night, tweeting a wealth of anecdotes, analysis and opinions, still beguiled by the game he left five years ago.

“It starts at 7, and it ends at 3 a.m.,” Susie Penders said. “And then he tapes the ones he can’t watch. We must spend $500 a month on TV programming.”

“Money well spent,” Tom Penders said.

After Penders began his coaching career in 1971 at Tufts University, he became one of the game’s most outspoken figures. A natural fit for a television studio, where many former colleagues have landed during their postcoaching careers, Penders, 69, favors the freedom that Twitter provides as a soapbox.

Penders believes there is substance to be found in his tweets, that he is not kvetching for the sake of it.

“Basketball and coaching was my life, and I care about the profession,” Penders said. “I care about the direction that it seems to be going in.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 22, 2015, on page SP2 of the New York edition with the headline: An Ex-Coach’s Spirited Ascent of a 140-Character Soapbox. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe

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