2008 Woodie Awards
Restrictions placed on social sites
The SCSU athletic department has implemented formal rules on the content of its student-athletes social networking accounts, but has not altogether banned athletes from using the social sites.
Issue date: 4/19/07 Section: Sports
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According to SCSU athletic director Morris Kurtz, student-athletes can be viewed in a negative light on Web sites such as badjocks.com.
The Web site, which glorifies athletes from high school to the professional ranks as well as cheerleaders misbehaving, claims to be "Where 'Cops' meets 'Sportscenter.'"
For Web sites like these, social networks like Facebook and Myspace are a blessing in disguise. Athletes have been caught on these social networks misbehaving many ways, such as underage alcohol consumption.
Some instances have even appeared on badjocks.com, an occurrence that has some colleges banning networking Web sites for its student-athletes.
The UM-Duluth athletic department has banned social networking Web sites to try to shield its players from bad publicity in Web sites such as badjocks.com.
Kurtz said he is not sure whether SCSU will travel down the same road as its North Central Conference partner.
"We are in the process of gathering information," he said. "We'll continue to gather information upon all the other schools around the country in terms to what approach they are taking."
Kurtz said there is a policy already set forth for SCSU student-athletes.
"We have a code of conduct where we ask for exemplary behavior from all our student-athletes at all times and all situations, both on-and off-campus," Kurtz said. "We have asked them to go to their Facebook and Myspace accounts and simply remove anything on there that they may feel is not appropriate, something they wouldn't want their mom and dad to look at."