Sophomoric pranks, trash talking, goofy pictures taken in a stupor at an all-night party: the cornerstones of the college experience.

Thanks to the Internet, though, they've also become part of a student's legacy. An embarrassing photo or caption on a Facebook page, an attempt at humor misinterpreted as a racial slur on Twitter, can haunt him or her during a job hunt and for years.

The damage can double if the poster or subject is a college athlete, because the school's reputation can take a hit as well. The NCAA cited the University of North Carolina for failure to monitor social media in its case against the school's football program last fall.

Yet the task of monitoring the Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube postings for the 100-plus members of a Division I football program would easily overwhelm a harried grad assistant or two or three or 20. To help in the process, monitoring services have sprung up in the past few years. Among them are Varsity Monitor, CentrixSocial and UDiligence, which is used by the University of Missouri football team.

"It's not a gotcha tool, it's a mentoring tool," said Kevin Long, CEO of UDiligence. "We provide a mechanism for the school to keep up and the athlete to protect himself."

How it works

UDilgence has developed a program, used by about three dozen colleges, that searches for key words in tweets, blogs, comments on Facebook and photo captions that could be considered objectionable or raise a red flag: anything from "kill" to "agent" to racial or sexual slurs. Long said that UDiligence provides each school with the list, from which the school can add or subtract. He noted that some coaches will delete curse words, while others might add the nickname of a rival school or some of its top players.

Players then must download an app to each of their social media accounts, which gives UDiligence permission to monitor the account.

"By installing our Facebook app, athletes agree to our terms, which is no different than if they installed any other Facebook app or game - like Words with Friends, Mafia Wars or Texas Hold'em Poker," Long said.

UDiligence then performs an initial scan of the entire account and sends emails to the athlete and school administrator of entries that contain a key word. After that, the service scans new entries only, once a day, and follows up with emails to athletes and the administrator of potential problems.

"It's up to schools after that point to decide whether it needs attention. We don't get involved with that," Long said.

Consequences could span the gamut of removing the material to missing practices to suspensions. Because the monitoring process involves athletes downloading apps and giving consent, schools seem unlikely to use the service to vet recruits.

"I don't know that there's a prohibition against it, but I'm not aware of a school that does it," Long said.

UDiligence charges $1,500 a team or $8,000 a school. Long considered it a bargain, when compared to the salary of assistant coaches, compliance staff or grad assistants who would otherwise monitor the sites. Some schools, though, find the services cost-prohibitive and instead use spot searches by staff members.

Such was the case with defensive back Yuri Wright, a four-star recruit from Don Bosco Prep in New Jersey. The University of Michigan withdrew its scholarship offer to Wright when officials discovered racial and sexual slurs on his Twitter account. Wright subsequently accepted a scholarship from the University of Colorado.

Red flags

The biggest objections to the service don't concern money but issues of privacy, fairness and censorship.

"Critics are looking at it from the wrong perspective. We're not Big Brother, we're big mother. We're trying to take care of the athletes' future, the athletes' reputation and things that could haunt them," Long said. "It's not about disciplining them, it's about teaching them."

Neil Richards, a professor at the Washington University School of Law, noted an Orwellian twist when he wondered whether it would be better if all athletes were created equal or if some were more equal than others. Most of UDiligence's clients monitor every athlete who represents the school, citing fairness. Missouri is an exception in that only the football team uses the service. Representatives of Mizzou did not respond to requests for an interview.

"On the one hand, the actions of an athlete can bring the university disrepute," Richards said. "But so can any ordinary student, and I think people would find it highly objectionable to apply this to all students.

"Maybe the actions of a star wide receiver can impact a school's reputation, so the university has an interest in his social media. But what about the 10th player on a Division III golf team? He's more like an ordinary student. So, the question becomes should the standard be different for some athletes."

Richards also noted the gray areas in disciplining an athlete for an objectionable posting, citing two examples. In the first, an athlete is suspended one game for tweeting that the police treated a roommate badly at an Occupy Wherever rally and declared, "Cops are pigs." In the second, an athlete gets an identical suspension for proclaiming on Twitter, "Coach is an idiot."

The second, he said, "is harder to get too worked up about from a free speech perspective. These things call for a tricky balance. Depending on the context, discipline could be problematic or not from the perspective of censorship."

Both Richards and Long agree that the issue of social media and athletes shouldn't begin and end with monitoring but be part of a program to help athletes learn to use Twitter, MySpace, et al, to their advantage. Hence, Long's company also offers social media training to students.

"You want to be Google-able for the right things: touchdowns, honor rolls, being all-conference," Long said. "You don't want to be Google-able for criticizing your coach or because you're in some photo from a party. We want to take a mentoring approach and protect their reputations."