In real life, it's hard to imagine that a stranger would decide to harass Cam Corhen.
Corhen is 21 years old and 6 feet, 10 inches tall. He's got 235 pounds of muscle draped across his broad frame. And he's a Division I college athlete: a forward for the Pittsburgh Panthers men's basketball team, averaging 15 points per game.
On the internet, though, none of that stops people.
The harassment of athletes on social media has become an epidemic, an experience so common that players today accept it as a fact of life.
College basketball players are more at risk than athletes in other sports, the NCAA has found, especially around March Madness, when thousands of abusive or threatening messages flood athletes, many of them from gamblers — some of it so severe and alarmingly specific that the NCAA must alert law enforcement.
The toll it takes, players say, has become difficult to bear. Fighting through tears after his Wildcats lost last March to end a disappointing season, Kansas State's Coleman Hawkins said the online criticism had gotten to him. "I did a poor job of letting people talk about me and affect my play," he said, sobbing. "I wish I could just go back and block out everything."
When the name, image and likeness door was thrown open for college athletes, social media promised to be a cash cow. Build a personal brand with a following on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, and lucrative sponsorship deals would soon come rolling in.
But as harassment and threats have grown, players (and coaches, too) have begun to ask themselves: Are the business opportunities worth the harassment? Increasingly, they have decided the answer is no.
"At the end of the day, we are human beings. We have feelings," said Indiana's Oumar Ballo after the Hoosiers lost in last year's Big Ten tournament, which sealed their fate of being left out of March Madness. Imagine, he said, "you wake up, go to work, and someone is wishing nothing but the worst to you and your work. It's mentally draining."
"If you're not cheering for us, then leave us alone," he added.
Online abuse is getting far worse
Corhen's eyes opened to the problem during his sophomore year, when he still played for Florida State University. In a November 2023 game against Colorado, he hurt his toe and had to leave the game early. The Seminoles won in overtime, but Corhen scored only two points.
Afterward, he got on the team bus and looked at his phone for the first time in hours. On his home screen were a series of unsettling DMs. "I messed somebody's parlay up, I guess, and I got some crazy messages," Corhen said.
One said, "I hope your mom dies," he recalled. At the time, Corhen was just 19 years old, barely a year removed from leaving home. It rattled him. He struggled to shake it off.
Nearly everybody in big-time college sports has this story now. To be launched from the anonymity of high school into the brightly-lit world of Division I college sports — with a media landscape that stretches from TV to news sites to podcasts to social media — is a wild ride.
Having a social media presence is effectively compulsory. "As an athlete, you want to be out there. You want people to know your name," said SMU guard Kyla Deck. "It can maximize the money you're making. It can maximize the stage you're putting yourself on."
To help their athletes build those brands, big-time athletic departments now employ staff dedicated to an assembly line of "creative content" for players to post — highlight packages, interviews, game footage shot by in-house camera crews perched on the sidelines specifically for social media highlight reels. Players often supplement those posts with stylist-approved fashion shots.
All this, of course, is to make money. Starting in 2021, when a U.S. Supreme Court decision forced the NCAA's hand in allowing student-athletes to earn income from licensing their name, image and likeness, or NIL, college athletes have regularly netted tens of thousands of dollars (or more) from sponsored social media posts and other marketing partnerships.
Even athletes with modest numbers of followers can earn money this way: Baylor's Bella Fontleroy (6,000 Instagram followers) recently hawked TLF Apparel sweatsuits. UCLA's Gianna Kneepkens (4,500 followers) has ads for Celsius energy drinks and the Japanese snack company Baby Star on her feed. The St. John's forward Zuby Ejiofor (7,600 followers) posted for Bose. Houston's Emanuel Sharp (12,000 followers) did a post for the fast food chain Freddy's.
Like the rest, Corhen began his career that way. But open Corhen's Instagram now, though, and you'll see nothing. No posts at all.
Back in 2023, Corhen returned from his toe injury after a month, but struggled to live up to his potential that season, averaging just 9.4 points per game. Looking for a fresh start, he transferred to Pitt. Still, he struggled with his mental health, he said, and the criticism online made it worse.
The public tweets are hostile enough. (A typical example: In January, after Corhen managed just two points in an 82-70 loss against Florida State, one X user wrote "f*** you point shaving bum @cameroncorhen.")
"After a game, it would pop up on the front page of my phone, what people arej saying if they tagged me," he said. "And it's just, like — I don't need that." The DMs, of course, were worse.
"Mind you, these are people with burner accounts, so you don't know who they are. You don't know their identity," he said. "And you lost their money, so they say really hurtful things."
This summer, almost two seasons after the gambler wished death on his mom, the Pitt forward decided to delete it all. "I couldn't get over that hump last year. So instead of trying to find ways to deal with it, I just cut it out completely," he said.
Coaches, too, question what it adds
When Corhen raised questions about the value of social media amid harassment, his coach, Jeff Capel, understood.
In Capel's first few years at Pitt, the team struggled, and the online criticism was loud, he recalled — loud enough to seep into his home life.
"My kids are seeing stuff at home, my children. I'm seeing the stuff, it's affecting me," he said. "I made the decision then that I don't need this, I don't want this, I can't do this anymore. So I just completely pulled away."
Now, he must coach his players through those decisions, too. "The thing that I tell them is that the main way in basketball that you can make money is to be a good basketball player," Capel said. "So if social media is causing you to be emotional, or to not be in the right mind state, or to react a certain way, or whatever — then I think you should really think about removing it."
For female athletes, there's an added pressure: a feeling of responsibility for helping to build the audience for the sport as a whole.
The ongoing surge of interest in women's sports was sparked by college basketball players like Iowa's Caitlin Clark and LSU's Angel Reese, who were already social media stars while they were still in school. "Without social media would we still be where we are now as a sport, as women's basketball players?" said Hannah Hidalgo, the Notre Dame guard and a favorite to win player of the year awards.
Before Brooke Wyckoff became the coach at Florida State, she played there in the late 1990s then spent nine years in the WNBA. It was a very different time for women's basketball. "Nobody even was paying attention if I performed poorly," she said. "There was no social media. In the newspaper the next day, it might show up this big," she joked, holding her index finger and thumb an inch apart.
Now, her staff at FSU includes a creative content team, and her team's off-court obligations include regular photo and video shoots, which are also now part of the recruiting process.
Wyckoff says she has spent a lot of time debating whether the time and effort spent on social media content are worthwhile. She still hasn't reached a conclusion. "It's what you have to do these days. It's standard operating procedure," she said. "But it doesn't help us put points on the board."
But what's not up for debate, she added, is that schools cannot provide players with social media content without also teaching them how to use the platforms responsibly.
"As we are encouraging them and providing them content so that they can build their brand, we also have a responsibility to educate them and to help them set up boundaries that are going to protect their mental health, or protect them in general," Wyckoff said.
Finding a way to be "regular"
Even those with social media accounts have long since wised up to the risks of posting anything too personal. "Everybody's watching you, and haters are watching, too," said Deck of SMU. "They want to go to your social media to find something to say about you. So just don't give anybody anything room to say."
Deck raised the example of Ja Morant, the NBA star who was suspended twice in 2023 after waving a handgun on two separate Instagram Live streams. In total, Morant missed 33 games and lost millions of dollars in salary. (This fall, while livestreaming on Twitch, Morant said, "I don't even like IG no more, man. IG changed my life.")
Last spring, Notre Dame's Hidalgo ignited an online furor when she reposted a video of the conservative commentator Candace Owens calling gay marriage a sin.
Afterward, Hidalgo apologized in a letter published by the Players' Tribune. "I've always been very private, and learning how to navigate the media in public as a young person is just plain hard," she wrote.
Even after that, it's still a shock to see how much she is talked about and scrutinized, both for what she does on the court and what she does off it, she told NPR last month. "It's like a rock and a hard place," she said. "I'm regular. I'm typical. I just put a ball in a hoop every couple of days."
Now, one upside of the end of an athlete's career may be that their time on social media can end, too.
Reniya Kelly of the University of North Carolina is one of the nation's top point guards — and a self-professed social media hater. "You guys will never see me on TikTok unless I'm forced to literally do it or someone pays me," she said. "I think it takes away the fun of the game. There's a lot of pressure and outside noise that comes in with social media."
She already has a vision for her retirement from basketball. "I want to be a farmer. I love land. I love fishing. I love having my own crops. I want to live off my own land," she says.
Kelly is a junior now, with a chance at a career in the WNBA. After that, there'll be nothing stopping her from going off the grid.
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