Thursday, August 16, 2007

P-Cubed: Players' Personal Pages

Professional athletes have player profile pages all over the internet. In tennis, too, the ATP and WTA put out official guides for media resources like TENNIS to use for information.

The players, however, many of them high school and college age, can't help but do a little profile creating of their own. While some have their own web sites, others aren't quite to that level (or just don't have the money).

The answer? Facebook. And MySpace. And seeing celebrity tennis players at their most vulnerable: online personal profiles.

Here you can find Ashley Harkleroad's facebook friends list. Notice Ashley has 79 friends (small for Facebook standards) which includes a wide array of tennis names. Ansley Cargill (once ranked in the top 250), Chelsey Gullickson and Kelly Liggan, the Irish player. Ashley doesn't stop at Facebook though, she's got a MySpace profile too.

(A view of Ashley's MySpace page. Interesting quote, right?)

This is Romina Oprandi's friend list, which is 207 people long. Oprandi is currently 162 in the world after breaking into the Top 50 last year.

Here is Shenay Perry's friend list. Notice her dark and kind-of-creepy picture at the top of the page. Shenay has 199 friends. 120 more than Ashley, but eight less than Romina.

Scoville Jenkins. Michael McClune. And Alexa Glatch. Want to be friends with the stars?!? Just ask them. Well, just ask Ashley...she could use a few more.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

MySpace doesn't really work because many fans create profiles for their favorite players (posing as their favorite players). Those with actual profiles (the facebook ones, for example) tend to skew younger, too. The current superstars tend to go the "official website" route, which tend to be very professional and not as raw as, say, Vince Spadea's homepage.

Nick McCarvel said...

Good point, Erwin. There are tons of psuedo player profiles, including Gasquet on both Facebook and MySpace. If you look close to Harkleroad's page, it's pretty legit. Vania King (also a legit page) is a top friend of her and consistencies run between the Facebook and MySpace profiles. What else would you expect from Ashley, anyway?

Anonymous said...

btw I saw Harkleroad play in Carson. Remember back in the day when she was being touted as the s**t? Speaking of, whatever happened to Monique Viele?

Nick McCarvel said...

Harkleroad was certainly touted to do a lot more than she has. She was a legit top 40 player back in '03. She's bombed since then.

As for Viele, TENNIS did an update on her recently. I guess she had a ton of family problems and injury. She lives in a town called Surprise, Arizona.

I'm sure she feels like she's led two different lives...