A webinar on the risk of alcohol consumption at game day tailgating events will be presented to promote alternatives to heavy drinking and campus safety.

The webinar is called “High Risk Prevention Strategies for Game Day” and is sponsored by the Illinois Higher Education Center (IHEC).

The webinar will be held Wednesday, June 8, from 11 a.m. to noon and will be presented by Tavis Glassman from the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio.

Glassman said he will talk about how big of a problem tailgate drinking is and ideas for heavy drinking intervention.

“Those ideas include education, offering alternatives, nonalcoholic alternatives on game day, policy changes, and enforcement,” he said.

Glassman said he worked on the webinar for the last couple of weeks, but he has researched his information since 2006.

Glassman did his dissertation on game day alcohol consumption and found that people drink more heavily on game day than any other social event.

“So if you have that many people intoxicated in one location, then it’s a public health issue, and it’s a liability issue for the university,” Glassman said. “Somebody’s going to get hurt, and we don’t want people to get hurt.”

Glassman said negative factors associated with high risk drinking include fights, vandalism, littering on campus and mixed messages about alcohol abuse sent to students.

Glassman said the education of public safety issues, such as high risk drinking, has been known to change legislation over time.

“It’s kind of like tobacco use. Fifty years ago, people actually smoked inside classrooms. The professor might even smoke while he’s teaching. And now you can’t smoke inside, and some people can’t even smoke on campus, let alone inside,” he said.

Glassman said the goals for the webinar are to help implement public safety and public health measures, and to inspire others to prevent high-risk drinking.

Jessica Wright, assistant director of the IHEC, said the organization is funded to do alcohol and other drug prevention programs for all four-year schools and two-year colleges in the state of Illinois.

Wright said the IHEC got the idea for the webinar from the colleges and universities that the organization works with.

“One of the things that has been a hot topic of discussion among the schools that we deal with is the concept of high risk drinking on game day, and so that was one of those topics that people wanted to see more information about,” Wright said.

Wright said people are sill registering, and the number of registrants will change from day to day until Wednesday.

Wright said people can register by going to https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/991298456 and registrants can log on Wednesday to view the webinar.

Wright also said the webinar will be recorded so anyone will be able to view the presentation on www.eiu.edu/ihec after Wednesday.

Alesha Bailey can be reached at 581-7942 or [email protected].