Community Corner
Online Harassment Of Women Athletes Often Targets Gender, Erodes Confidence
Abuse is rising as interest in, and betting on, women's sports is rising, but often includes racist and sexualized language men don't face.
October 19, 2026
The final buzzer sounded on the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team’s Final Four loss to the University of South Carolina in the 2026 National Collegiate Athletic Association tournament. But while the game had ended, the social media comments were just getting started.
Find out what's happening in Across Marylandfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
“Y’all sorry m—f—s gonna go win 54 straight and I throw money on y’all and proceed to turn into a 2A JV girls basketball team,” one user posted to the Huskies’ Instagram page.
“If y’all lose that mean the men gone lose and that’s cause these apps kept posting y’all … time to hedge my bet,” another user said.
Find out what's happening in Across Marylandfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
While women athletes experience online harassment related to sports betting, abuse of women athletes on social media also often targets gender and appearance, as evidenced by comments on team and player Instagram accounts during the 2026 NCAA women’s basketball tournament.
Timothy Fong, a professor of psychiatry and co-director of UCLA’s Gambling Studies Program, called social media harassment “an emerging area of concern for all athletes.”
When the UCLA women’s basketball team won the 2026 NCAA championship over South Carolina in April, Fong witnessed such harassment for himself.
“During the national title game, I went online to look at a betting site and see all the chats, and there were really horrible messages, misogynistic, chauvinistic,” Fong said. “Even players that were playing well, ultimately, they were losing money for somebody, right? And so there was a lot of name-calling and just terrible, like, abusive language.”
Online harassment during women’s March Madness reached a fever pitch in 2024, when the final collegiate seasons of star players Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese brought record viewership to the tournament. Women’s basketball players received almost three times the abuse of men’s players during that year’s NCAA tournaments, according to a study conducted by the ethical data science and AI company Signify.
Gabbie Marshall, Clark’s Iowa teammate, deleted social media apps from her phone after receiving hate comments for drawing a critical foul in the final seconds of Iowa’s Final Four win against UConn, ESPN reported at the time.
“Gambling has become part of the daily experience, and people have lost their humanness, their empathy toward what the athlete is doing,” Fong said. “[They’re] not viewing the athlete as an athlete, but viewing the athlete as a commodity.”
While Signify’s data showed that abuse during the women’s basketball tournament decreased by 83% and betting-related abuse declined by 66% during the 2025 March Madness compared to the 2024 tournament, sexist abuse still remains a problem in college sports.
The top two categories of online harassment directed toward women athletes through the early rounds of the 2026 tournament were sexualized and racist abuse, Signify’s Jonathan Sebire told Sports Illustrated in April.
“Is the tall one an actual girl? Why does she sound and look odd?” one user commented on the UCLA women’s basketball Instagram page about Lauren Betts.
“Only thing stopping her is burger and fries,” another user wrote on the Iowa State women’s basketball Instagram page about Audi Crooks.
Such harassing messages take a toll on women athletes. According to a 2026 survey by the NCAA, 30% of women athletes said that betting-related abuse reduced their enjoyment of their sport.
In that survey, 178 women reported experiencing betting-related abuse compared with 386 men. But 21% of athletes in women’s sports noted increased stress and anxiety due to that abuse compared with 11% of athletes in men’s sports. Women athletes in that survey also reported reduced confidence and enjoyment in their sport than their counterparts in men’s sports.
The harmful messages carry over into games, as 17% of women athletes reported that betting-related abuse negatively impacted their performance, compared with 8% of men.
Brian Petrotta, a scholar on sports media and sports betting and an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, attributes part of the problem to the media’s normalization of sports betting.
“What’s really interesting is how quickly it happened,” Petrotta said. “We went from decades of something that, at least in mainstream journalism, we don’t talk about … and now it’s pretty well integrated into every aspect.”
He added that the creation of the prop bet changes the conversation about sports because it’s more concentrated on a player-specific outcome rather than cheering for a team to win or lose.
“While sports betting may be normalized, what we don’t want to see is it being normalized that athlete harassment is OK,” Petrotta said. “I’m not sure that enough is being done on that front either.”
Maryland Matters is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501(c)(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: scrane@marylandmatters.org. Follow Maryland Matters on Facebook and Twitter.
