For College Athletic Scholarship Money, Get Recognized, Get Recruited, but Don’t Get Stupid

Thursday, November 29th, 2007, filed in PrepChamps News

This in from the El Paso Times in southwest Texas: a star recruit, literally “once considered one of the top high school football linebackers on the West Coast”, is allegedly doing his best to get noticed off the field, and not in any favorable context. We won’t say more here, but go ahead and read the story.

So, why call attention to this? What’s the implication here for the thousands of high school athletes and collegiate athletic scholarship hopefuls? Dire, if you don’t heed the warning.

The rise of web 2.0 – from online social networks and blogs to recruiting sites and virtual candidate profiles for jobs, scholarships, awards, etc. – has yielded some unexpected consequences for those people unabashed at telling the world their business or getting caught in some illegal, unfortunate or embarrassing situation that just happens to end up on a video sharing site.

And while we’ve probably all seen examples of these (click here for sheer hilarity), few people realize that just as much as in this online context, your actions offline are now fair game as well for anyone with a video recorder or mobile phone. In other words, a head college football coach or athletic director is not going to relish the thought of his players throwing a party, inviting some strippers and then wondering what went wrong only to consequently realize that there’s streaming video of the entire thing posted to a video sharing site . . .

And this is to say nothing of dog fighting, steroid abuse, perjury, or home invasion, basically a you-name-it of completely unnecessary allegations, scandals and violence that has merely grazed the surface of both collegiate and professional sports – the NFL, MLB, NBA, Duke, Rutgers (Don Imus is already back on the air) and the University of Miami to name a few – recently AND in the past. Rest assured, scandals have always been there, but the greatest implication now is that there’s a pervasive ability to inform the world of what’s happened, and you don’t have to be on staff at the local news station to do it.

So, call this an obvious word to the wise, then: if you want to Get Recognized and Get Recruited for the mere chance at a college football or basketball program – let alone college athletic scholarship money – keep your nose clean, both on the computer and off it.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 4:33 am and is filed under PrepChamps News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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