National Scouting Report aligned to help families with social media questions and verification following Ohio State mess

NSR scouts are on the up-and-up with prospects and parents from the first contact

Social Media is taking center stage at Ohio State University, but not in a good way. The alarming development exposes the Twitter activities of one Charles Eric Waugh, 31, a man listed on Kentucky’s sex offender registry. Waugh had reached out to several Buckeye football coaches, recruits and current players on Twitter and had gone as far as to post pictures of himself with some of them. While the snapshots appeared innocent on the surface, one highly-prized 2013 OSU football commitment de-committed over the weekend due to the implications raised by the contacts.  And because of this specfic problem, National Scouting Report is making a stand to support the families of high school athletes that have come to rely on Social Media as a communication devise.

Upon learning of the problem, OSU athletic director for (NCAA) compliance, Doug Archie, made a stern statement to the a school’s coaches, athletes as well as to recruits regarding the attempts by Waugh to contact them  through Twitter.   Archie’s email statement said, “We strongly recommend that you take the to block his access to your Twitter and Facebook accounts.  In addition, we’ve enclosed a photograph and a link to a news article regarding this individual. As a reminder, the individuals who you associate with on social networking sites (i.e., Twitter, Facebook) can have negative implications on your reputation and the university. Please remember to choose your ‘social media friends’ carefully!”

We applaud OSU for taking this action. It was the right thing to do and it obviously had to be done.

The imbroglio highlights a problem with Social Media which many parents in particular have reportedly long feared — that their children are open to being “friended” by unsavory individuals with nefarious intentions. At NSR we do reach out to high school athletic prospects as a matter of operational procedures, but it is our careful and well-considered policy to always insist that our scouts instruct prospects to immediately inform their parents that we have made contact with them, including providing the prospects and parents with the scout’s name, email address and phone number.  We want there to be no doubt that parents need to know that our scout has made initial contact and that it is for sound, acceptable reasons.

Social Media certainly has its advantages, but parents are right to monitor their children’s activities including making certain that they are “friends” with or being “followed” by people whose intentions are legitimate and non-threatening in any way.

At National Scouting Report, as the world’s oldest and most widely respect high school scouting and college athletic recruiting service, we have highly-trained scouts stationed across the country and in five foreign nations.  We vet these scouts carefully prior to bringing them aboard our team.  And, because of our 32-year history of working with coaches at every level of competition, we are well known by area and state coaches as hard working people of the communities where we live whose objective is to help high school athletes realize their dreams of participating in college athletics.

More importantly, we want to insure parents and prospects that if they ever have any doubts about an individual’s validity as an NSR scout, we are more than happy to provide proof of our scouts’ identities and affiliations with our company. Please, do not hesitate to contact us if there you have a question or concern.  Families can reach our Director of Communications, Alan Parham, at (800) 354-0072 or via email at alan@nsr-inc.com.  We will be happy to help.