College athletes themselves have shown just as much of a desire to be a part of the conversation. Athletes tweet daily about games, practices, and experiences on campus. Offensive linemen tweet pictures of their gargantuan lunches. Followers always knew what was going on with Kentucky via now-graduate Terrence Jones in tweets that were often 40 characters or less. University of Missouri guard Kim English even used Twitter to hitchhike back to Columbia after arriving at the airport in St. Louis. Social networking websites have undeniably led to an exciting, personal dialogue between players, fans, and all those involved in collegiate athletics.

However, social networking can also get athletes, coaches, programs and institutions into hot water. In October, Western Kentucky running back Antonio Andrews was suspended for tweeting about the school’s fans. Lehigh wide receiver Ryan Spadola was suspended for retweeting a racial slur. In January, high school cornerback Yuri Wright’s sexually and racially explicit tweets cost him a college scholarship. Just last month, the NCAA handed North Carolina a one-year bowl ban and took away 15 scholarships after discovering nine major violations. The investigation was kicked off by a tweet.

Thanks to situations like these, many schools have begun monitoring athletes’ social networking usage to varying degrees. Some programs demand that athletes “friend” coaches or administration members. Others have begun to hire private companies to monitor athletes’ usage. Some schools, like the University of Arizona, have demanded that athletes make their profiles private on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other social media platforms. At some schools, athletes have even been required to surrender their usernames and passwords. Some (including Kent State and Loyola of Chicago) have even gone one step further, completely banning all athletes from Facebook.

Although social networking can further enhance the already riveting discourse surrounding college athletics, it can have serious implications. Statements by players on the sites, regardless of intention, are there for all fans and followers to see. Athletes can make statements that incriminate a program or university. Statements that complain or suggest dissatisfaction with playing time or coaching strategy may discredit or undermine a team’s goals or chemistry. Whereas complaints about a teammate or coach were once confided within another teammate or friend, they can now be heard by the rest of an information-hungry universe. It’s hard to argue with college coaches that are instituting in-season bans of Twitter or Facebook, or asking their athletes to stay off the sites altogether.

So is sanctioning athletes’ social network usage or requiring personal information constitutional? Is it wrong to hold athletes to a set standard as mandated by a coach or athletic department? Does social network usage detract from the locker room environment or from the mission of the athletic department or university?

These are the types of questions being asked when deciding whether or not to monitor athletes. The debate centers around the constitutionality of the actions some schools are beginning to take, as college students in general obviously have First Amendment rights.

Media lawyer and former Ohio University hockey player Jonathan Peters discussed this issue. Peters is the Frank Martin Fellow at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and is earning a PhD studying the First Amendment. He says that, although most speech by college students is protected, some argue that the case should be different for college athletes, who represent the university at-large and have profiles viewed by donors and fans. Peters said coaches may feel they can regulate athletes’ speech, because they have offered them a scholarship. However, according to Peters, this is an unconstitutional condition, because it serves as a prior restraint on speech.

Supreme Court cases involving speech are often decided based on a test of strict scrutiny. Peters said that for a restriction on speech to pass this test, it must meet a compelling state interest and must be narrowly tailored to that interest. From a constitutional law standpoint,  a restriction on athletes’ speech is likely unconstitutional.

“I can’t imagine a court accepting that as a compelling state interest,” Peters said.

Facebook statuses and tweets are undoubtedly a form of free speech. From a purely legal standpoint, the First Amendment allows athletes to say almost anything they want. But surely some coaches want a place to draw the line. So the discussion reaches another crux. Athletes’ free speech is certainly lawful, but should they use social networking sites, and with what limitations, if any?

The short answer is that if the sites are going to be allowed, they should serve as an exercise in moderation for the athletes who choose to make use of them. Kim English has earned a reputation as an enlightening athlete to follow on Twitter. English interacts with fans, his teammates, and other athletes and affiliates of the university in a positive and tactful manner in his tweets. But even English has been ever so subtle in publicly claiming a disdain for Missouri’s former head coach, Mike Anderson.

Peters said a problematic tweet by an athlete is usually a sign of a bigger issue. If athletes’ tweets reflect negatively on the university or expose a compliance issue, it is obvious that the problem occurred and should be dealt with internally. The 140 characters themselves are not the issue.

Chad Moller, spokesman for the University of Missouri football team, said that, at Mizzou, each coaching staff is responsible for monitoring their athletes, but that Mizzou athletes are not given any specific guidelines for their social network use.

“We don’t have specific rules, but this falls under the general expectation that how our student-athletes represent themselves in social media forums is no different than how they should conduct themselves in the public,” Moller said.

The final say on social network use by athletes should be left to the coaches, who are responsible for preparing their teams to compete at a high level. Coaches should enforce team rules that allow athletes to post freely, but also require them to comply with external monitoring by the athletic department or coaching staff. Social media usage can become quite a distraction, and coaches may want more control of their athletes’ attention.

For the most part, even the most active of tweeters do not seem to be causing any harm. A sampling of Terrence Jones’ tweets of “Good afternoon everyone” or “We in the building!” appear quite simple. Jones didn’t stir up the pot much online when he played for a Kentucky team that won the NCAA championship.

It would seem that with a passive monitoring of usage and the exercise of common sense, athletes and institutions would be able to avoid issues with social media. But with all the issues college athletic programs have been encountering, is it enough?

The post Is Monitoring Athletes’ Social Media Use Lawful? appeared first on NextGen Journal.

The Marlins’ history has seen some tremendous successes. After joining the league as an expansion team in 1993, the Marlins won the 1997 and 2003 World Series championships. The Marlins farm system has produced some of the more exciting players to play the game in the last 15 years, such as Josh Beckett, Mike Lowell, and Miguel Cabrera. Unfortunately, the Marlins are also known for their infamous “fire sales” and “market corrections.”  It often seemed that these measures taken by ownership have dealt or released competent major league talent for no apparent reason. It was usually a lack of desire or ability to make a financial commitment to players such as Derek Lee in 2004, or Moises Alou and Gary Sheffield in 1998. As a result, Marlins fans, or lack thereof, showed their support of the Florida Marlins with the National League’s lowest attendance rate the last five seasons. It does not help that a cavernous NFL stadium tends to dampen the “America’s pastime,” sentiment, or that the beach is nearby.

However, the new Marlins Park will do plenty to add nuance to the experience of those who may begin to attend the upstart club’s games. The stadium will include two aquariums behind home plate and a swimming pool in left field. The park will also feature a retractable roof, which will keep games in play during sudden onslaughts of South Florida rain. Rain delays had long been a problem for the Marlins, as storms would often cancel games an hour or less before their scheduled start times.

The Marlins lack of an adequate ballpark in seasons past has kept them from maintaining a steady stream of revenue to fund improvements to the team. Although the Marlins lost in an attempt to acquire top free agents Albert Pujols and C.J. Wilson, they were able to acquire high profile players in Mark Buerhle, Carlos Zambrano, Jose Reyes, and Heath Bell this offseason. The Marlins payroll now exceeds $100 million, and their spending resembles that of a mid-market club. A rotation featuring Buerhle, Zambrano, Josh Johnson, and Anibal Sanchez, projects to be one of the more capable in the National League in the 2012 season. The team also looks to speed up run and plate production, as total runs scored by the team were the second lowest mark in franchise history in 2011, and the team’s batting average last season was the lowest. The addition of Reyes, as well as a healthy Hanley Ramirez will give Miami much more strength and speed at the top of the line-up.

The Marlins have long been included with other Florida franchises that struggle to draw fans. Even with capable teams and players in years past, the Marlins have often proved unexciting. However, the Miami Marlins, a completely reinvented team, seem poised to carry on into what could and should be a successful future in south Florida.

The post Marlins Baseball: A Brand New Transformation appeared first on NextGen Journal.

I have to remind myself occasionally that this pressure we put on ourselves in the end is not worth it. It’s not to say that we should not be motivated and be anxious to wake up and be the best “us” that we can be. However, we also have to be realistic in our goals and expectations. An old adage from my favorite old youth soccer coach, who happens to be my dad, occassionaly pops back into my mind from time to time — “have fun, get better.”

Winning, victory, success, happiness. We always set the end destination for our goals and behaviors. Life will be better when I graduate college, then I won’t have to go to school anymore. I will be happy when I get that promotion. I’ll be happy when I’m in the ideal relationship. The satisfaction will never just magically show up at each of these cornerstones. We have to appreciate the process by which we grow and develop as people and how we got to where we are.

Competition is the best motivator we have as human beings. But “have fun, get better” was always great to hear even when we lost 7-1. At the end of the day, you still got to eat an Oatmeal Cream Pie, suck down a Gatorade, and enjoy being a kid. My dad loved to win as much as anyone even in those 8 a.m. Sunday youth league games, but he taught that more important then the victory was an enjoyment and enhanced understanding and appreciation of the game.

It’s important to have goals and a vision for the future. Careful planning and preparation ultimately leads to better execution. However, taking life too seriously has dear consequences as well. We stress about all the remedial tasks that have to get done over the course of a work week or a college semester. What if we treated our daily lives like we did soccer practice at age ten? Sure paying the bills or filing a report is not quite like slide tackling in the mud, but all we can ask is for improvement of ourselves. There’s no way we can possibly achieve everything we want to, and there’s also unavoidable unpleasantries in life. What if we treated failure like we did our six year-old tee-ball losses?

The lesson to take away from “have fun, get better” is that it is a philosophy that should not be contained to our pre-adolescent, carefree lives. In our steady stream of conciousness, this is the philosophy in which we should approach everything. Victories, success, and our desires will be met when we approach life with a youthful perspective that sees our learning and experiences as part of a process necessary for our personal growth.

The post Have Fun, Get Better appeared first on NextGen Journal.