<p>Ok, I'll bite. I'll be the one to tell potential college recruits and their parents.....if your son or daughter wants to be athleticially recruited by an elite college, you may need to have a serious talk with your son or daughter about "cleaning up" Facebook or other social media. In addition, they should not put themselves in compromising positions or any position that can be questioned. Yes, college coaches will (absolutley) check up on them before they enter a program and while they are in a program. Coaches want to know what level of maturity, and judgment your son or daughter possesses before they bring him/her into their college program. In addition, my 16 year old son had this same discussion with his travel baseball coach. We live in a much different world than just 5 years ago.</p>
<p>We had an incident at a local prep school where someone anonymously sent a bunch of pictures from Facebook of kids at the school drinking and partying. Nothing happened to the offenders and parents were up in arms that their kids privacy had been invaded. Never mind that the photos showed their kids drinking hard alcohol, posing in very sexually explicit positions. Give me a freakin' break! </p>
<p>Regarding college coaches and Facebook, several years ago my daughter went to camp at top SEC school. The coaches told the elite campers that they checked the Facebook profiles of all recruits and that they expected all team members to friend them on Facebook. Every potential athletic recruit should make absolutely certain their online profile is squeaky clean! Also, my daughter was recently a finalist for a prestigious scholarship. When she went to the interview, members of the committee had obviously researched her online because the nomination came from her school and they asked her about things not related to her high school.</p>
<p>There was a party senior year that I did not allow my daughter to attend. It's not that we thought there was going to be alcohol or other substances in use there. To the contrary, it was a group kids whom D didn't know to be drinkers. However, also attending was a girl we didn't trust one bit. This girl had shown herself many times to be very jealous of my daughter, and had already lied about her once to the high school coach.</p>
<p>Aware that amazing tricks can be done now with doctoring photos, I didn't want this girl to have access to my D in even a wholesome party setting. I was afraid this girl might simply snap a photo of my daughter holding a can of soda and edit in a beer can in its place and then send it to the schools recruiting her.</p>
<p>And that is the one concern I have with this type of action by the school. I don't consider photos on FB to be incontrovertible evidence. Heck, just recently the ex-boyfriend of a girl we know photoshopped his head onto another guy's more muscular body and posted it as his profile picture. Supposedly, it was a flawless editing job. He suspected that the girl dumped him in favor of a more jacked new boyfriend, and wanted to show her he'd been "working out" too, lol. This stuff scares me.</p>
<p>Wow,</p>
<p>I had the pleasure of having an impromptu conversation with an admissions counselor @ Tufts Med school about a month ago....,.</p>
<p>I originally called to discuss high summer programs, she picked up the phone as she was the only person in the office and we had a wonderful hour long conversation that spanned so many topics. From education, to childrearing, to politics, you name it! Too bad my daughter is only a highschool freshman! LOLOL</p>
<p>One topic we discussed @ length was.... yes, FACEBOOK!! I began by telling her that last September, I made my daughter delete her page d/t some pretty raunchy/sexually explicit posts that many of her friends had made(and many of these were catholic school kids)... the posts touched on topics such as... "adult toys", oral favors, drugs use, brawls, bullying, court dates for assault/possession charges.... you name it... I was shocked to read these things coming from these kids who come from VERY good 2 parent, professional homes! </p>
<p>So I made the decision to have her delete her page... and told her that if I found out that she had made another page without my knowledge, I would remove every tooth in her mouth! LOLOL even though she has expensive braces which have cost me almost as much as a trip to Tahiti!</p>
<p>She was miffed and I explained to her that FB does not give her life/fortification and is not a requirement to her success or happiness! I now believe its the BEST decision I made b/c she has made high honors every marking period and FB is too much of a distraction!! </p>
<p>So lets fastforward to April. This wonderful women insisted that I ensure that my daughter does NOT leave an electronic record of her misdeeds/debauchery online because ac's DO check the pages of ALL applicants! According to her, they had almost 8,000 applicants to the medschool... and they checked each FB page! They only accepted 167 and many an applicant was denied d/t their posts/pics on FB.. Remember folks, the competiton is fierce and we don't want our kids to lower the chances of being admitted because they had a weird need to share everything with the world!</p>
<p>Schools don't want anyone who represents them to have their sexual/drunken history catalogued online! I remember the days when people kept things private....I know I would never want the "fun times" of my youth to be memorialized on a medium that is omnipresent! I am sure many of you echo that sentiment! </p>
<p>Do yourself a favor, take a peak at your students FB page AND more importantly, the pages of their friends! Anonymously... just lurk and I bet you will be glad that you did!</p>
<p>I agree wit New Haven Mom... this common sense principle applies to ALL college applicants, not just recruited athletes.</p>
<p>agree, never a good idea to advertise your risky business.</p>
<p>although I do see a direct link between many winning athletes character and risky behavior character. for the most part my daughter was to busy training or sleeping to get in trouble, but had she not had athletics i fear she would have been pushing it to the limit in other areas, not so good for her. </p>
<p>and even "good kids" make mistakes. the only teenagers I know that don't make mistakes are boring kids. maybe parents, college admins, etc, should lighten up on the kids.</p>
<p>I agree, but prefer my daughters "boring" personality to the kids who are out here doing drugs, getting pregnant, going to jail..dabbling in gun play. and trust me, all of these things are happening in my community,,, Most kids feel that a good education and taking ones future seriously is "corny" and "boring".... I live in the inner city and pitfalls are on my own block! </p>
<p>Maybe she is boring(and by boring, I mean she gets straight A's, follows rules etc) because I have always pointed out the evils of the world in our own neighborhood.... which abound! And I am also able to show the contrast of excellence by pointing out the students on Yales campus!! We are 2 minutes away from the campus there is a huge disparity in our city... there are no grey areas... which is good... kids need to see black/white...... what you get when one works hard and what you get when you are "cool" and want to follow the crowd....</p>
<p>Its sad that kids have so much to contend with.. reality TV, FB... bad behavior is the norm now!! Who would have ever thunk it!</p>
<p>^^good points! and if i was raising kids in an "inner city" rough neighborhood, I'd probably opt for boring too, as in safety and survival.</p>
<p>ironically, my daughter would never have had the opportunity to decline Yale's offer had she not taken risks. thankfully most risks (not all) were in the direction of performing, athletically and artistically. One thing is certain, no one considers my daughter boring:)</p>
<p>But it's no day at the beach having a kid who's wired to take risks, which of course I blame on my spouses dna, who comes from a multi generations of risk takers. And I mean war battles, business start ups, and inventions, as well as drug and alcohol abuse. My side of the family is boring compared to hers, but we also haven't done anything remarkable compared to the other side.</p>
<p>Many kids nowadays are savvy to the potential for being embarassed and sabatoging jobs, school, etc. and either don't post anything explicit online (and share juicy stuff via FB chat) or merely use psuedonyms for FB names.</p>