In a crowd of several hundred, nearly all of the students had a Facebook account. But what worried Janet Judge, collegiate sports lawyer, was the content of each student’s page.

“Anything that (students) put up on the internet is no longer theirs,” Judge said. “(Students) have to think about the implications of putting things up.”

Judge delivered the speech “Developing your personal brand: The Power of Facebook” on Monday to an audience that was mostly comprised of student-athletes at Emporia State.

“The majority of things that I said about student athletes apply across the board,”
Judge said. “The same thing about being careful about the kind of pictures that you are posting and the kind of things that you are writing, these are all important things.”

Her focus was how student-athletes represent themselves and their universities.

“When you mess up, the headlines are that you play on a certain team and that’s what people remember,” Judge said.

Judge discussed hazing, social networks and alcohol as a representative of the NCAA. She has presented at 100 schools in the last two years on a grant from the NCAA.

“She was really informative and she made things known that you wouldn’t necessarily know was happening online or on Facebook,” said Loryn Zoglmann, sophomore elementary education major and member of the Stingers. “If you aren’t a student athlete, I think it all still applies to you.

“You don’t want people to know things or see pictures of you that aren’t flattering. And even people who aren’t student athletes get the shirts that represent their school and if they are out doing things, they wouldn’t want their school to have a bad name because of it.”

According to an Alfred University study on hazing that Judge presented, one in five student-athletes surveyed had been subjected to illegal hazing, two in five student-athletes consumed alcohol on recruiting visits and it is estimated that 250,000 student athletes were hazed in the survey year.

While hazing is illegal in every state, Judge said it still happens. However, students only get caught if they document the events with photos and put them online.

“I thought that she would be a good candidate to come and talk to our campus because Facebook and sexting is new and cutting edge,” said Carmen Leeds, associate athletic director. “We wanted to educate the students about it.”

Sexting was also a topic that Judge brought up because the consequences of sending explicit texts and revealing photos to others can be just as damaging posting photos online. Things sent through text message can be posted online just as easily.

One thing that Judge was adamant about was the need for students to pay attention to who is viewing their pages on social networking sites. She said that with the new privacy settings on Facebook, students may need to reset their privacy settings and should always keep them on “Only Friends.”

“A lot of people see what’s on Facebook and they don’t even realize (that it’s bad),” Leeds said. “We want students to be smart so that they could get a job one day and not have anything come back to haunt them.”

Judge used examples of students from other schools who have had consequences for things that were posted online including photos and twitter statuses.

“There were a bunch of football players who were waiting for their coach for a team meeting,” she said. “One of the players was disgruntled and got on his twitter account and wrote ‘I wonder why my own coach can’t show up on time to his own team meeting.’”

“His coach opens up the newspaper the next morning and on the front page of the sports section is that tweet with his picture. Nobody on the Texas Tech football team has a Twitter account anymore.”

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