Podcast by Jake DiBlasio, producer Nina Weiland, and camera operators Andrew Snowden and Aubrey Ennis.
Story By Jake DiBlasio
It’s Sunday afternoon; after a long week, all you want to do is kick your feet back and watch your favorite sports team. While you’re watching the game, something catches your eye, and you can’t help but notice it. It’s not a big sack on third down or a half-court shot but a sports gambling ad.
It’s not just one advertisement, but tons of them. Gambling is now being introduced to our youth at a rate like never before, according to local and state studies.
According to The Guardian, over the course of an NBA or NHL game, the logo of a betting company or a gambling reference occurs 2.8 times per minute on average. While in the past, parents had the option to mute the television or change the channel while the advertisement was on the screen, now the ads flash so frequently, avoiding them is nearly impossible.
At the same time, young adults have been gambling at a rate like never before. According to a recent study, 22.5% of students in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, have engaged in gambling for money. The trend is reflected in college students, too. Take Delaware Valley University, Caine Block, a freshman on campus. He spoke of his experience with online gambling.
Block mentioned that he, and many others he knew, were illegally placing wagers on sporting events. In the state of Pennsylvania, an individual must be at least 21 years old to sign up for an online sportsbook or casino. Even with laws and regulations in place, this has not stopped teens and young adults from getting caught up in this epidemic. A 2023 national study from the NCAA shows that following sports betting’s legalization in 2018, nearly 70 % of all college students are betting on sports games. The study points the finger at the rise in advertisements for the influence on betting. In that study, is shows that 63% of students surveyed recall seeing betting ads.
When talking to Gabrielle Woods, another student on campus, she said she knew nothing about online betting or knew no one who did. However, she still stated she saw constant advertisements on both social media and television. Even those who haven’t been introduced to online gambling by a friend or family member are also being targeted.
The Beginning: Getting Hooked
Gambling doesn’t start off as an addiction. For most people, it is a hobby and a pastime. However, for some, it becomes more than that. What may start off as a small bet on your favorite player to hit a home run or a few hands of blackjack could easily turn into chasing your losses, addiction experts warn.
With the introduction of online gambling in 2018, people have greater access than ever before. In an interview with Josh Ercole, the Executive Director of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of Pennsylvania, he discussed how easy it has become to place bets since online gambling has been introduced.
“It’s all about the convenience,” Ercole reported on DelVal Student Media’s “Tea Time” podcast. “As far as the gameplay, sitting in a machine that you know in front of you at a physical location that might have certain impacts. It’s visual; there’s the sounds and the sights and all the feelings that come along with that. You might not be able to mimic that directly on a phone or mobile device, but (you have) that accessibility.
Before, someone wanted to play a slot machine in Pennsylvania, they would have to wake up in the morning and brush their teeth, get dressed, and drive to a facility, or take a bus to a facility, or whatever the case is. Now you can basically eliminate all that.”
Josh Ercole
What Ercole has said is clearly backed up by The Pennsylvania Interactive Gaming Assessment: Online Gambling Report. Adults from age 18 to 24 make up 32.3% of exclusively online gamblers. What is especially concerning is the fact that in Pennsylvania you must be 21 years old to sign up for an online casino or sportsbook, yet so many people are participating in it. In the same assessment, it showed that 20.4% of online gamblers have participated in some kind of illegal or unregulated online gambling.
On top of this, Ercole also mentioned how little awareness there is in schools and other environments to educate children and young adults on the risks of online gambling. With easy access to gambling, younger generations are getting in over their heads without properly being informed of the risks, he said.
Signs of addiction
With the changes to the landscape and the introduction of online gambling, it has become much easier to hide signs of addiction. In the past, people may have been missing school, work, or social events to go to a casino and participate. Now, people could do both at the same time, making it harder to identify changes in someone’s daily behavior.
The transition from hobby to addiction could be a subtle one, especially if you don’t know what to look out for. When talking about this with Ercole , he mentioned keeping an eye out for a few key changes in a friend’s or loved one’s behavior.
“What we are often faced with is trying to identify behavioral signs and cues that may indicate that something is changing. If you somebody is gambling, if you know that somebody gambles, if they have accounts, if they go to a casino regularly, or whatever the case is, you can kind of look at how their relationship is with gambling to identify that maybe not necessarily things are a problem but they’re changing in a way that aren’t healthy. Maybe they are talking about changing their bet limits or maybe increasing the amount of time they are spent involved in the activity.”
While changes could be extremely subtle, the important part is they are there and can be identified. Habits and patterns will change slowly over time, and it is crucial if you are wondering if someone is addicted or needs help to reflect on recent changes in behavior that involve and don’t involve gambling.
Prevention and How to Help
Ercole said apps are available to aid in recovery from a gambling addiction. Users can benefit by daily check-ins on their phone. The growth of technology has increased the opportunities and options for people who need help to get it. Ercole mentioned how now there are ways for people to get help without even having to meet with a counselor or go to meetings. This allows people who may feel ashamed or embarrassed to get the help they need.
While they are not readily known, help for people struggling, or even wondering if they are struggling, with a gambling addiction is available. Ercole mentions http://www.pacouncil.com and 1-800-GAMBLER as excellent resources. For 1-800-GAMBLER, that is a help line that is available 24 hours seven days a week that someone can call or text. The number of calls to the helpline regarding online gaming problems increased from 20% in 2021 and 2022 to 34% in 2023 – in 2022-2023, there were a total of 2,834 calls to the helpline, with 974 specifically about online gaming (in 2021-22 and 2020-2021, those numbers were 2,401 and 479, respectively). This is a big step in the right direction for allowing people who need it to get help.
“Sometimes I joke I have a very simple job of educating 13 million people a phone number” Ercole said “At the end of the day, everybody in Pennsylvania that if they have any type of issues or if they need help or a gambling concern they can call that phone number… But again just having those conversations, early educating folks that there are these risks and that we can have that conversation without assigning a good or a bad. It’s really about what we can do so everyone is staying as safe as possible through the help of everyone involved.”
