A prominent high school athletic association has created a new course outlining the risks for students of sports betting, a growing area of concern among educators and advocates.
The National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS), a school athletics advocacy organization, designed the course to address the problem of student gambling. It includes prevention strategies and potential consequences for high school students who become immersed in betting.
“We wanted to create something that could simply create awareness for everyone and start getting the ball rolling on this,” Dan Schuster, NFHS director of educational services, told Education Week.
The course was released this month and is designed for coaches, administrators, student-athletes, and parents. Since the course launched, it has been accessed by 1,300 users.
Sports betting is part of a larger gambling problem among students, especially teen and preteen boys. Thirty-six percent of boys (ages 11-17) participated in gambling activities in the past 12 months, according to a Common Sense Media report published earlier this year.
Educators said they see the course as a resource and an avenue for raising awareness of the risks for young people.
The resource offers “a toolkit to know to look for certain [behaviors in students] now, and that’s what I was looking for [when taking the course],” said Tony Miller, director of athletics for the American Leadership Academy West Foothills in Waddell, Ariz.
Why is student gambling on educators’ radar now?
Worries about the risks of betting have risen considerably over the last couple of years, said Matt Missar, a clinician with The Better Institute who specializes in anxiety, video game addiction, and gambling.
Kids are getting exposed to gambling as young as nine or 10 years old, he told Education Week. Parents may not recognize how their children are being introduced to it, because young people are often exposed through the guise of video games that have “gambling mechanics.” Children are also introduced to gambling by consuming online ads about betting while viewing unrelated content or by seeing others at home engaging in this [sports betting] behavior, the clinician said.
Young children are particularly susceptible to gambling because their brains are still developing. At a young age, many times kids are after a “reward,” which can come in the form of winning a bet. Unfortunately, the part of the brain that recognizes the consequences of this behavior isn’t fully developed, said Missar.
“If you’re thinking about it like a race car, they have super-sensitive acceleration when it comes to these rewards, and the brakes are still being developed—that control part of their brain,” said Missar.
In recent years, gambling has also become more accessible to young people because the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, effectively legalizing sports betting. This decision has normalized the idea of gambling, said Dr. Timothy Fong, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“There’s been so much more popular culture and media attention paid to gambling in all arenas,” said Fong.
Another part of the problem is that gambling is considered a hidden addiction, making it harder for schools to address it, he said.
When students are running a bracket pool for March Madness and including teachers, that could that be considered gambling, said Fong. Other examples of gambling in school occur when groups of students play cards for money or when kids download and play gambling games on their phones.
“A teacher giving a student a beer would never be tolerated in any high school in America, but a teacher joining a child’s March Madness school for money would,” he told Education Week.
Gambling prevention measures can be student-led, experts said
While educators and other adults can help to inform students about the risks of student betting, the most effective way for young people to learn about the dangers of gambling is through their student peers, said Fong.
With “addiction and mental health initiatives, the [best] are the ones where you’re empowering young people [and] they’re an active participant,” said Fong.
He’s heard of groups of students who, on Friday nights, create public service announcements around gambling or education campaigns.
“It should be the young people exploring and thinking for themselves,” said Fong.
Miller plans to use the information he learned from the NFHS gambling course in a student-led way, too.
Every year, two representatives from sports teams in his school, American Leadership Academy West Foothills, meet with Miller to learn about a topic, and the students then go back to their teams as a resource for that topic. This year, he hopes to make the topic about gambling.
David Baylor, the executive director of the Delaware Interscholastic Athletic Association, also took the course and plans to create an awareness program for school administrators, principals, athletic directors, coaches, and parents. His next step is to send out a newsletter that will give an overview of the course and direct them to it, he said.
“My goal is for athletic directors and the coaches to see it,” said Baylor. “If they can identify potential issues [like students engaging in sport betting], then we can start to work on them together to address any problems that may exist.”
