by Max Olson,
Daily Nebraskanread online
HERE
April 19, 2010 - Keith Zimmer knows Nebraska's student-athletes derive plenty of benefits from having Facebook and Twitter pages. It's the downside of those public pages that worries him and Nebraska's Athletic Department.
“It can definitely benefit you, but it can certainly haunt you as well,” Zimmer said.
Nebraska's associate athletic director runs the Life Skills department and is well aware of the fact other schools around the nation are running into problems with student-athletes’ online postings.
Thanks to the popular social networks, schools around the nation have at times had to scramble to reprimand its student-athletes for inappropriate and questionable postings.
For example, Kansas basketball player Tyshawn Taylor aired the Jayhawks’ dirty laundry on Facebook in September after he and some teammates brawled with KU football players. Taylor helped bring the fight to light when he bragged that he broke his hand while throwing a punch.
After Taylor posted a veiled threat to transfer as his Facebook status in January, he was forced to delete his account.
Less than a week later, now-former Texas Tech coach Mike Leach barred his team from using Twitter after one player complained about him on the site. Leach scolded his players publicly for being “a bunch of narcissists that want to sit and type stuff about themselves all the time.”
In February, Oregon earned some national attention of its own when Ducks receiver Jamere Holland used his Facebook page to offer an expletive-filled complaint about the discipline of a teammate who was arrested for DUI.
In a subsequent post, Holland wrote, “I wish I could block whites as friends an only have blacks LOL, cause apparently I’m misunderstood.” He was kicked off the team a day later.
“It doesn’t surprise me to hear that about other schools,” Zimmer said. “I just hope those schools are paying attention and trying to educate their athletes like we are.”
For the past year, Nebraska’s Life Skills department has worked to try and prevent these incidents from happening by monitoring its more than 550 student-athletes through the use of a program called UDiligence (
www.udiligence.com). The automated service tracked Facebook, Twitter and MySpace posts and sent e-mail alerts to Zimmer and NU coaches each time it spotted an inappropriate posting.
“The goal was to create a culture and let the student-athletes know they need to be responsible with their social networking,” Zimmer said. “It can become everyone’s business in a quick hurry, and for their own future best interests, it’s important they understand the pros and cons of social networking.”
Zimmer admitted more than two dozen student-athletes complained about the program when it first began and saw it as a violation of their privacy.
“We told them that once you signed on to be a Nebraska student-athlete, it now becomes our business,” Zimmer said. “We try to present it in a positive way: We’re out to protect your image and your future, and we want to see you succeed well beyond Nebraska.”
The program is based on a database of more than 500 objectionable words. When a student-athlete uses one of these words, the post gets flagged. They’re usually confronted by a coach or assistant shortly thereafter.
The words UDiligence seeks to find fall into five categories: alcohol, drugs, race, sex and violence. Keywords can be added or removed at any time, and misspellings of common offensive words are also included.
On average, Zimmer got up to 15 e-mail alerts a day this year, and he said about three-fourths of those were due to inappropriate language.
Though he didn’t get involved in the disciplinary steps following those posts, Zimmer couldn’t recall any instances in which a questionable post online led to serious discipline.
“It’s more about an initial confrontation and saying, ‘Delete it or remove it, and don’t do it again,’” he said. “That’s usually the nature of the conversation.”
Like other athletic departments around the nation, Nebraska began looking into online monitoring options after it had to face its own significant PR mess.
The dismissal of Husker wrestlers Paul Donahoe and Kenny Jordan in August 2008 brought the Nebraska Athletic Department plenty of unwanted attention. When it was revealed that the two posed for nude photos and videos for a pornographic Web site, the controversy earned national notoriety and even an ESPN investigational piece.
At the same time, it also served as an opportunity for Zimmer to educate NU’s student-athletes.
“One of the things we want the athletes to understand is that there are consequences for your behavior and actions,” Zimmer said. “For them, that was the ultimate consequence.”
Nebraska’s pursuit to beef up its online monitoring, Zimmer said, was spurred by athletic director Tom Osborne’s interest in preventing future embarrassments.
“Coach Osborne just wanted to try to better educate and monitor the behavior of our student athletes,” Zimmer said. “We wanted to try and be more proactive and not be surprised by behavior like that.”
Kevin Long created UDiligence in 2007, and it’s believed to be the only program that offers automated social network monitoring. “When we first started off, a lot of people in athletic departments didn’t even know what social networks were yet,” Long said.
Long’s explanation for his program’s purpose is simple: Student-athletes’ posts can embarrass their schools and come back to haunt them when they starting looking for jobs after college.
“It’s not meant to be a disciplinary tool, it’s meant to be a mentoring and educational tool,” he said.
Long likes tell the story of a former All-American basketball player and four-time academic All-American who approached him after he gave a presentation on social networking.
“He went to do a job interview at a Fortune 100 company,” Long said. “And when he went in, the person doing the interview turned her laptop around and said, ‘OK, show me your Facebook page.’”
Needless to say, that didn’t go well for the former college star. The applicant, Long said, was drinking from a beer bong in his profile picture.
“She said, ‘Thanks for coming in, we’re not really interested anymore,’” Long said. “And he didn’t even get to do the interview.”
Student-athletes are valuable to companies for their extensive leadership and teamwork experience, but those positives can quickly be offset by an online slip-up.
Long doesn’t mind if some student-athletes are put off by the Big Brother-type oversight UDiligence offers coaches.
“When they graduate, they’re going to be very thankful they had somebody out their doing this stuff for them and that their coaches and school cared enough to see the value in protecting their reputations online,” he said.
Nebraska’s commitment to preserving their image came with a steep price – Long estimated that NU paid between $5,000 and $6,000 for a year of using UDiligence.
Fellow Big 12 schools Missouri, Baylor and Texas A&M are among the dozen that are currently using the program, and about 20 more are planning to this year.
“Schools really need to put together a program like Nebraska did,” Long said. “They showcase what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, and that the benefit is in the athlete’s hands.”