""It really bothered me that I played Steubenville," he says. "When [the story] went national, I remember watching on TV and seeing the road that leads down to the stadium. I remember thinking, I rode down that road. I was in that town."
Baker also felt judged by strangers, just for being a high school player.
"You were looked at strangely," he said, describing how he felt as a football player. "People just looked at you as violent people. I really didn't like that whole outlook on us."
He wanted to do something about it, but didn't quite know what...
The two came up with an idea to have high school football players across northeast Ohio take a public pledge to end violence against women and girls. They started with a list of the top 31 high school football players in the area, a group that was featured in an unrelated yearly series on Cleveland.com. Baker wanted all of the players to take the pledge in person together, so he began to make some phone calls. He hoped that using the biggest high school football stars in the state as ambassadors would send a strong message to the community that what happened in Steubenville was not representative of football players in general. The response from his peers was beyond what Baker could've imagined."
http://www.sbnation.com/2015/9/17/9105829/ohio-state-jerome-baker-is-changing-athletes-sexual-assault-2015
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