The UAF Athletic Department has warned athletes to be cautious of their use of MySpace, Facebook, and similar networking sites.

"Any student-athlete who has a site on Facebook or Myspace will be subject to dismissal from the team and/or the school if their sites contain inappropriate images or comments," an e-mail from Scott Lemley, head coach of the women's swim team, reads. "If you need me to define 'inappropriate' for you, just ask."

The UAF athletic department has not stated an official policy yet, but articulated its general guidelines to coaches before the year began. It then told athletes about its position at the Alaska Nanook athletic orientation.

"We can't legally tell students what sites to use or not use, but we recommend that they don't put anything online if they don't want to see it on the front page of the newspaper," said Athletic Director Forrest Karr.

Coaches were also asked to remind athletes of this on their own. Some, such as Lemley, chose to address the issue in e-mails, while others, including the rifle coach, addressed the matter at team meetings. Karr said that coaches were warned that athlete's profiles may be looked at in the future, but said no definite plans were in effect.

Rifle team member Becky Hershberger, 18, said she thought the matter was handled well.

"It was explained why we needed to take inappropriate material off, and I understand the reasoning behind it," Hershberger said.

Hershberger chose to keep her profiles active, as did most rifle team members. Hershberger's profile contained basic information such as her age and political views, as well as her interests, activities and favorites.

Other athletes, ostensibly under more pressure from coaches or with more controversial information and photos in their profiles, felt that their best option was to delete their site memberships entirely.

Prior to the department's warning, many athletic teams had "groups" on Facebook, collaborative sites that included all teammates with individual sites who chose to join. Since the warning, most teams have chosen to delete their groups. The swim team is the only team that still maintains a group, and only eight of the team's 16 athletes are members.

Currently, there are no NCAA regulations in place regarding the use of networking sites. An NCAA spokesperson said NCAA policy usually lags behind technological advances due to the procedure of the governing body.

However, the NCAA will most likely discuss regulating the use of networking sites by athletes, administrators, and coaches in the future, the spokesperson said.

Because the NCAA doesn't have a policy on the sites, individual schools are left on their own to decide how to deal with the information student-athletes display.

Several larger schools have administrators regularly check the MySpace and Facebook profiles of every student-athlete for material that could be problematic and report it to the coaches, who are asked to take the appropriate actions with their athletes.

Most schools do not address the issue until it is a problem, another contributor to the NCAA's inaction.

Why the UAF Athletics Department became pro-active with the networking site issue is not clear. Karr said networking sites hadn't been a significant problem for UAF yet and that UAF was just responding to the national problem. But one coach said problems had already surfaced here in Fairbanks.

"It basically stemmed from one of the athlete's who had some inappropriate images," Lemley said. "Just a reminder to the athletes to look on their site and delete anything that wasn't appropriate."

And it's still not clear who's going to play watchdog over all the sites.

"Somebody is going to spend some time looking at various athletes sites," Lemley said. "I'm not going to do any monitoring at all."