NCAA Study Shows Women Basketball Players Receive Far More Abuse Than Men
Women's basketball has experienced a massive rise in prominence in recent years, which is largely owed to superstars like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, JuJu Watkins, and Paige Bueckers dominating in the NCAA.
Yet, this increased attention has also brought a lot of online negativity with it. So much so that an NCAA study that was released on October 10 revealed that female college basketball players receive multitudes more online abuse than their male counterparts.
"Women's basketball student-athletes received approximately three times more threats than men's basketball student-athletes," the study wrote.
It also added that "18% of all abuse was sexual, making it the most prevalent type of abuse used to target male and female student-athletes," and "12% of all abuse was related to sports betting".
Some other jarring statistics in the study were that "10% of abuse consisted of racist content... 9% of abuse was homophobic/transphobic... and 6% of abuse, approximately 380 instances, was violent."
This data was gathered as a result of the NCAA engaging, "Signify Group to provide its Threat Matrix service to support the Association in studying and responding to online abuse and threats directed at NCAA championship participants, including student-athletes, coaches, officials and committee members. This unique initiative was implemented to further promote the mental health and well-being of the college sports community through data collection, analytics and action. "
In addition, the only threats and abuse that were gathered were those made public. This means they don't include private messages, which are likely both more prevalent and worse in terms of content.
"I was shocked by the volume in addition to the profanity that was being directed at the kids," NCAA president Charlie Baker told ESPN in an October 10 article about the study.
"It is just vile, nasty and brutal and, in some cases, seriously threatening. I think it's incumbent on us to raise the concern," he added.
An NCAA study on social media abuse found that women's basketball players were frequent targets.
— espnW (@espnW) October 10, 2024
More on the findings here: https://t.co/KHGsT8kgEq pic.twitter.com/3QJgcqiMo4
While sports can convey so much of what is great about communities both online and in person, this study displays sports' underbelly that's becoming increasingly more vile.
Grant Young covers Women’s Basketball, the New York Yankees, and the New York Mets for Sports Illustrated’s ‘On SI’ sites. He holds an MFA degree in creative writing from the University of San Francisco (USF), where he also graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing and played on USF’s Division I baseball team for five years. However, he now prefers Angel Reese to Angels in the Outfield.