Sports gambling concerns campuses during March Madness
Robert began betting on a friend’s illegal sportsbooks in high school, and he continued using illegal books in college until he was old enough to bet legally.
At the North Carolina school, which legalized sports gambling in 2024, he, his fraternity brothers and others placed several bets or bets on professional and college basketball and football games. He knows people who have run away from large debts, ghosting bookmakers to make big money. And he has a friend who sold an illegal book – his betting list – for $25,000.
“On a college campus, you go to a lot of college football games. You go to college basketball games, and any game you watch, you probably bet on it,” said Robert, whose name has been changed.
Why we wrote this
Legal sports gambling floods broadcasts with advertisements during major sporting events like March Madness. Experts say they are concerned that a younger audience of high school and college students is being drawn to gambling.
March Madness, the year-end men’s and women’s college basketball tournaments currently underway, is expected to bring in a record $3.3 billion in sports betting, according to the American Gaming Association. But March is also Problem Gambling Awareness Month, and there is growing concern that the rapid proliferation of legal sports gambling is affecting younger and younger audiences.
“I would tell my friends and others that it’s an epidemic,” says Robert.
A shift is underway among young people: “Instead of being sports fans, they are sports players,” says Andrew Miller, associate professor in the School of Communication, Media and the Arts at Sacred Heart University.
In the past, people gathered together to cheer on their team during March Madness – and many still do – “but now there are groups who stay together to watch the game as players,” Dr. Miller says. “Instead of cheering for their team, they might be cheering for an individual player to get 10 rebounds or more or less, so they have the upper hand.”
Warning signs
A week before March Madness began, University of Missouri Chancellor Mun Choi sternly reminded his students of the potential harms of sports betting, which is new to the state.
Dr. Choi asked people not to try to influence the outcome of games or harass or threaten student-athletes about their performance, a sign of the prevalence of gaming on campuses.
Dr. Miller, a professor at Sacred Heart, conducts an annual survey on sports betting. This year’s survey found that 62% of Americans say gambling ads have an impact on younger viewers. Nearly half of those surveyed, 46 percent, say they are concerned about the volume of advertising during major events such as the Super Bowl or NCAA basketball tournaments.
A 2024 national survey by the National Council on Problem Gambling showed that nearly 20 million adults in the United States report experiencing at least one problem gambling behavior ‘on multiple occasions’ in the past year.
NCPG released another set of survey results this month showing that two-thirds of adults in the United States admit to participating in some form of gambling before the age of 21.
“We certainly have concerns,” says Cait Huble, director of public affairs for the NCPG, which is neutral on legalized gambling.
“The fact that younger generations see gaming so normalized in society – it’s in every game, it’s ubiquitous in advertising and access is so much easier than ever because you have access to it on your phone. It’s just more present in our culture,” she points out.
The American Gaming Association, which promotes and lobbies for the gaming industry, did not respond to a request for comment.
Growing recognition
What Ms. Huble doesn’t see is states or the federal government making a concerted effort to remind people that gambling is a high-risk activity. She says gambling addiction currently doesn’t receive federal funding, unlike drug and alcohol addiction.
States fund efforts against gambling addiction, but available resources are uneven. Recently, a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives introduced the Points Act, which would use one-third of sports betting excise tax revenues — most recently a total of $300 million — to fund the effort.
“This is certainly what we consider to be a major public health problem, with minors and adults not being fully aware and understanding the risks and the likelihood of harm,” Ms Huble adds.
A number of schools are trying to be proactive when it comes to student gaming. Last year, Penn State University began screening and offering free services to students concerned about gambling.
“During conversations with students about problematic behaviors, gaming was mentioned several times. Penn State is aware that the national trend in collegiate gaming is on the rise, and we are concerned about the impact this can potentially have on the mental, emotional and physical well-being of our students,” Lizbeth LoRusso, the university’s assistant director for health promotion and wellness, told the Monitor via email.
“We discuss students’ gambling behaviors, help them identify trends, triggers and contributing factors (alcohol or cannabis use) and provide them with healthier coping skills and harm reduction strategies,” she said.
A “reward system” without a “braking system”
When Robert bets on sports, he says it makes “the games more enjoyable to watch, and that thrill is fun.”
Researchers find that this type of thrill triggers a part of the brain that activates a reward system, making this behavior addictive and contributing to compulsive behavior, according to the American Psychological Association.
Impulse control and awareness of long-term consequences are not yet fully developed in young people, even in their 20s, says Natalie Spiteri-Soper, clinical director of Kindbridge Behavioral Health, a national telehealth platform specializing in the treatment of gambling and gambling problems.
Dr. Spiteri-Soper says this problem is amplified when you take young people and throw them into a situation like March Madness.
“They’re inundated with messages about the game. They’re inundated with constant things that say ‘this feels good.’ The reward system is powered, but they don’t have a braking system,” she says.
Families can look for signs other than just needing more money that might indicate their child has a gambling problem. They include depression, sadness, loss of control, isolation, anxiety and distress, especially when losses pile up. Dr. Spiteri-Soper says parents should monitor young people who are normally very sociable but suddenly become isolated.
“Gaming isn’t really about the money. It’s about the feeling I get when I play, either I feel like I belong, I’m part of that excitement, maybe I’m escaping the pressure of college, work and relationships,” Dr. Spiteri-Soper warns.
Increased comfort
Charlotte, currently a graduate student, finished college in May in Rhode Island. Sports betting platforms FanDuel and DraftKings are not legal in Rhode Island, so in college she would cross the state line into Massachusetts to place bets.
“I started with single bet games, and then you started learning the techniques and everything else, and then I started doing parlays. I kind of fell into a ‘yeah, I’m going to keep doing that,’ right around the Super Bowl,” she says. She spoke about her game on condition of anonymity and her name has been changed.
One day in college, she bet a 13-inning parlay – a move that connects multiple bets for a high potential win, but with high risk because losing a leg loses the bet. She bet $150 and won $2,000. The most she ever lost gambling was about $150 on sports betting and $400 at a casino playing blackjack, she said. One of his old friends dropped out of college because he owed $10,000 to a bookmaker who published an illegal book and had to find a job to pay it off.
“I saw how difficult the situation is for some people,” she says.
