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For many college students, the timing of North Carolina’s legalization of sports betting had a storybook feel.
After Gov. Roy Cooper signed House Bill 347 into law last June, the State Lottery Commission made January 8 the target date for going live. But logistical hurdles pushed the start date back to March 11—the day before the ACC men’s basketball tournament began. Jake Wilson, a 21-year-old junior at UNC-Asheville, said that in a state where college basketball is king, the timing felt auspicious. “Obviously, with Duke, UNC, N.C. State, and Wake being in the ACC tournament, there’s going to be students on those campuses who are going to be placing a lot of wagers,” he said. “From a marketing standpoint for the betting companies, it’s great.”
A sports writer for UNC-Asheville’s student newspaper, The Blue Banner, Wilson played basketball, football, and baseball in high school and describes himself as a “sports fanatic.” He hopes legal sports wagering will encourage people who don’t follow sports to become as passionate about them as he is.
But he also foresees the potential for disaster. “I don’t think it’s necessarily good for the students themselves,” he said.
HB 347 made wagering on professional, college, and amateur sports as well as horse racing legal for those 21 or older. Since 2018, sports betting in North Carolina had been limited to three physical locations: Harrah’s Cherokee Casino Resort in Cherokee, Harrah’s Cherokee Valley River Casino in Murphy, and Catawba Two Kings Casino in Kings Mountain. Now it will be allowed at certain professional sports venues and eight online sites. Proponents say the change will boost tax revenue and allow the state to regulate sports gambling, which some North Carolinians found ways to do even before it was legalized.
Before 2018, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, sports betting was only legal in Nevada. It has since been legalized in 38 states and the District of Columbia. With this rapid expansion, numerous problems have emerged.
New Jersey, Michigan, Connecticut, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia are among the states that have reported dramatic spikes in the number of calls to their gambling addiction helplines after sports betting became legal. This trend doesn’t bode well for what’s to come in North Carolina, particularly on its college campuses, where skeptics wonder if the benefits of legalized sports betting can possibly outweigh the dangers.
“I think everything’s going to change on March 11,” said Dr. Michelle Malkin, an assistant professor at East Carolina University’s Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology and director of the Gambling Research and Policy Initiative. “People are going to see that gambling can be fun and exciting, but for some it will become a problem. Gambling’s not a healthy way to entertain yourself.”
The Need for Sunlight
After the 2018 Supreme Court ruling, Delaware was the first state to legalize sports betting. Once Virginia and Tennessee did the same in 2020, it was only a matter of time before North Carolina joined the herd. Some credit the domino effect; others point to the vast amount of money that stands to be made.
Virginia took in $67 million in gambling tax revenues in fiscal year 2023, local media reported, while Tennessee collected $83 million during that same time period, according to the sports-betting site Legal Sports Report. With a population larger than both, North Carolina is projected to quickly surpass them. “It’s not crazy to think that North Carolina could hit $100 million in tax revenue in a few years,” said Christopher McLaughlin, a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Government.
“People are going to see that gambling can be fun and exciting, but for some it will become a problem.
Michelle Malkin, East Carolina University
Some of this money will help underfunded sports programs across the state. The law requires 13 of the 17 universities in the UNC system to receive $300,000 annually—excluding, most notably, UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State, whose athletic departments each generate more than $100 million a year. Both the North Carolina Youth Outdoor Engagement Commission and the nonprofit North Carolina Amateur Sports will also receive $1 million a year.
Legalizing sports betting will also allow the state to regulate an activity that’s already occurring anyway. “There are all sorts of underground betting markets that exist right now,” said Dr. Todd McFall, an associate teaching professor at Wake Forest’s Department of Economics. “There’s no sunlight on those markets, so we don’t get to see those transactions. Now we’ll be able to monitor them and understand how the markets are working. Legalized betting is better.”
Malkin, the ECU professor who studies gambling in various communities, including college campuses, echoed that sentiment. “We know that gambling already occurs here in North Carolina,” she said. “It’s part of our culture, and if gambling is part of our culture, we have a responsibility to not only legalize and regulate it, but also research how individuals are being impacted, educate them, and provide resources for those who struggle with addiction. Illegal and unregulated gambling leads to a lot of problems.”
A survey of 1,600 undergraduates at 12 of the 17 UNC campuses conducted by Malkin’s Gambling Research and Policy Initiative last year found that about 58 percent of college students had gambled in the last year, and 10 percent had gambled on sports. Also, more than 70 percent of male undergraduate students gambled in some form in the last year.
“We’re seeing a huge increase in the number of college students gambling,” Malkin said.
The numbers jibed with a report the NCAA released last May. Students at several North Carolina universities also described sports betting as popular on their campuses, a notion confirmed by the way it’s now treated in student newspapers. When I attended Duke in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, finding an article that offered gambling advice in The Chronicle was about as likely as a Blue Devil rooting for a Tar Heel, but such articles are now commonplace.
The origins of this dramatic change can be traced to August 2018, when then-senior Andrew Levy pitched an article about prop betting to The Chronicle’s sports editors. “There was no pushback on the idea from anyone in the sports section,” said Levy, who now works as a paralegal in New York City. “In fact, they were enthusiastic.” The paper has been publishing one or two such articles a week over the last few years, and last fall, N.C. State’s Technician started doing the same.
Such media coverage helped normalize sports betting on campus long before politicians legalized it in North Carolina. “When you watch ESPN, they always talk about what the line is on a game,” said Ethan Smith, a 22-year-old senior at Appalachian State University and the sports editor of The Appalachian. “It gets ingrained into your viewing experience. It’s become a part of sports culture. Anytime you have a conversation with someone about a game it’s like, ‘Who’s favored?’”
“I’m still surprised when I’m watching a game, and there’s not just advertisements for online sportsbooks but also a discussion of the spread,” said McFall, the economics professor at Wake Forest. “From my students’ perspective, it’s just a way of life.”
‘It’s Really Not Difficult’
Despite being illegal, students say sports betting has thrived on college campuses. Braden Bock, a senior at Wake Forest, said many students, regardless of their age, use online sportsbooks, companies that accept wagers on sports via the internet. Many of these companies are located overseas, so they aren’t subject to U.S. law, but some Americans use them anyway.
Bock said other students use online sportsbooks that have been created by fellow students. Aspiring bookmakers, those who accept bets based on agreed-upon odds, only need to pay for readily available software that generates betting lines for games. Meanwhile, those interested in gambling on such sites just need to be referred by someone who already has an account with a particular bookie.
“When you watch ESPN, they always talk about what the line is on a game. It gets ingrained into your viewing experience. It’s become a part of sports culture.”
Ethan Smith, Appalachian State student
“If you want to bet, it’s really not difficult,” Bock said. “All it takes is one connection to find someone who has a bookie. If a kid wants to bet, he’ll easily figure out how to do so.”
Most of these operations depend on an honor system. Winning players receive a Venmo payment from their bookie, while losers receive a Venmo request to pay their debt. According to Bock and Wilson, it’s an imperfect arrangement. Both said they had heard stories of students who had lost hundreds, and in one case thousands, of dollars and refused to pay their bookie.
While North Carolinians are now able to place bets at newly licensed online sportsbooks such as BetMGM and ESPN BET, a slew of gambling-adjacent apps have been operating since 2018 and become popular among students. Some of these apps bill themselves as social media sites for sports fans, even though their interfaces look exactly like online sportsbooks.
Wilson, the UNC-Asheville junior who covers sports for his student paper, said he started using an app called Fliff during last year’s NFL playoffs after he saw an ad on Instagram. Fliff, which describes itself as a “social sportsbook,” has become wildly popular since launching in 2019, with 1.4 million downloads last year. Users only need to be 18 and can play for free.
Fliff starts new users off with 5,000 “Fliff coins,” a currency that’s only useful in the app, as well as $5 of cash, both of which they can use to make bets. Users can buy more Fliff coins with their own money, and the site regularly doles out small increments of those coins as well as cash to encourage them to keep logging in.
Fliff didn’t respond to a request for comment. Fliff CEO Matt Ricci told The Washington Post recently that the site is technically a sweepstakes contest, users must be at least 18 to use it, and the company doesn’t actively recruit underage users.
Wilson said he bet the $5 the site gave him on the Super Bowl and lost, but Fliff had succeeded in hooking him. Ever since, he’s been using the site to bet 50 cents or $1 on a game.
As nice as it would be to win a little money, Wilson said his main motivation is making the games he watches more interesting and testing his knowledge of certain teams. “If it’s a Saturday or Sunday and I don’t know what to watch on TV, I’ll throw out a wager and watch a random game,” he said. “As a sports journalist, I like to be credible. If I’m right, I feel a sense of gratification, like I know what I’m talking about.”
“All it takes is one connection to find someone who has a bookie. If a kid wants to bet, he’ll easily figure out how to do so.”
Braden Bock, Wake Forest senior
The Instagram ad that succeeded in getting Wilson to join Fliff is part of a massive marketing campaign. From 2021 to 2023, spending on online gambling advertising in the U.S. jumped to $1.8 billion from $1 billion, according to the research and strategic consulting firm BIA Advisory Services. The group has predicted that such spending will top $2.9 billion this year.
Some college students will use the promotions these sites offer to walk away with some extra spending money and a story to tell. For winter break, Bock returned home to Illinois, a state where sports betting has been legal since 2019. Using an Excel spreadsheet to figure out how to take advantage of all the promotions he was offered, he made $575 in less than 12 hours.
Others won’t be so lucky.
Risky Behavior
Both Malkin and the Gambling Research and Policy Initiative estimate that 5 percent of college students are at risk of gambling disorder, which can lead to psychological issues, debt, and failing grades. Experts predict that number will rise in North Carolina now that sports betting has been legalized.
“iGaming and sports gambling are much more attractive to younger gamblers, and they are more likely to lead to problematic gambling,” said Malkin, the ECU gambling researcher. “We know that individuals who are engaged with slot machines can cross over into problematic gambling faster. What we see with iGaming and sports wagering is that same rapid exposure to problematic gambling.”
As the faculty advisor of Wake Forest’s Sports Analytics Club for nearly a decade, McFall has witnessed the focus of club members shift from writing papers about professional sports teams’ personnel decisions to discussing their fantasy teams and various bets. He believes the ubiquity of betting opportunities now available to students will be a major problem.
“The part that really worries me is that the cell phone is going to be a place where a lot of people will be doing their wagering, and cell phones are little addiction machines,” he said. “Gambling amps up the serotonin, dopamine, and adrenaline fixes these things deliver, and then you layer on top of that loss aversion, and there’s going to be some people who lose large quantities of money. The Pandora’s box of problems that might open needs to be fully thought out.”
Malkin said the ease of betting via phones could harm college students in particular—people in their late teens and early 20s whose brains aren’t fully developed. “These apps allow people to place bets every couple seconds. For some students, it will become a problem,” she said. “We’re looking at individuals who are more susceptible to risky behavior engaging in risky behavior with gambling but being told it’s totally normal.”
Students in North Carolina only need to be 18 years old to use Fliff, Sleeper, and Underdog and 19 to use PrizePicks, but to use the online sportsbooks that are now legal in the state they need to be 21 years old. Some gambling advocates argue that most college students aren’t 21 and therefore won’t be making sports bets.
(By the same logic, underage drinking shouldn’t be a problem among college students, but by any measure that’s false. When it comes to finding ways to skirt regulations, no matter what their GPAs are, college students are geniuses.)
“There are a lot of safeguards and regulations that are being put in place,” said Alison Wood, the prevention coordinator of the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services’ Problem Gambling Program. “However, as we’ve seen in other states, there are tons of ways to get around them. A young person using their parent’s identity, for example.”
Smith, Wilson, and Bock all shared stories about friends from high school who used the identity of an older sibling or cousin to open an account at an online sportsbook.
“There’s always going to be kids that are smart enough to figure out a loophole,” said Wilson.
‘Campuses Aren’t Ready’
Two years after Virginia legalized sports betting, its state legislators made gambling education mandatory in public schools. That hasn’t happened in North Carolina.
Malkin identified this as a huge blind spot. “In our study, we found that less than 3 percent of our students had been educated about gambling in college and under 1 percent had been screened for gambling, whereas we’re screening everybody around alcohol and drug use,” she said. “College students are not being given the tools and education necessary to make smart decisions. Our campuses aren’t ready.”
NCDHHS’s Problem Gambling Program has been offering $5,000 grants to colleges and universities to raise awareness of problem gambling, screen students, and provide treatment. The program has also partnered with UNC Behavioral Health Springboard to produce a learning module that specifically targets sports betting among young adults. And it’s partnered with the gambling-education company Epic Risk Management, which sends former athletes to college campuses to speak with students about the perils of sports betting. That program is currently being tested at UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke University, Chowan University, and High Point University, with the plan to expand to more campuses in the future.
The Problem Gambling Program will see its annual budget increase to $3 million a year from $1 million, thanks to the tax revenue from sports betting. One way it intends to use that money is to counteract the blitz of advertising directed at college students by contracting with the multimedia company Tar Heel Sports Properties to convey a different message. “We want to put ads out there that encourage individuals who might need help to stay within their limits and to call the helpline,” said Amanda Winters, the administrator of the Problem Gambling Program.
While many universities in the state have a page on their website dedicated to problem gambling, most of these pages do little more than help students identify the problem and offer vague advice. As far as speaking to someone at a campus counseling center specifically trained to handle gambling problems, that could be much more difficult. “They don’t have anybody who’s had more than a day of, if any, training in the world of gambling,” said Malkin. DHHS’s Problem Gambling Program does offer training workshops for campus counselors. The most popular, Sure Bet, consists of two seven-hour days and costs $25.
The Problem Gambling Program also has a helpline, where gambling disorder specialists offer advice, make referrals to treatment programs and support groups, and, if necessary, provide crisis counseling to ensure students’ safety and wellbeing. Winters emphasized that the helpline is open 24/7, confidential, and free, and that students shouldn’t hesitate to use it. “There’s nothing immoral about having a gambling problem,” she said. “It’s a disease, not a decision. Nobody wakes up and decides, ‘Today I’m going to spend all my student loan money.’”
While state agencies and college administrators scramble to preempt problems, students are also navigating new terrain. “I’ve noticed in the past year of me using Fliff that I’m not enjoying watching sports as much because I’ve got a stake in almost every game,” said Wilson. “It’s almost like, ‘What’s the fun anymore?’”
Correction: Jake Wilson’s age has been corrected. He is 21.
Storms Reback has written five nonfiction books, including Ship It Holla Ballas!: How a Bunch of 19-Year-Old College Dropouts Used the Internet to Become the Loudest, Craziest, and Richest Crew and In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World. He lives in Asheville and is a regular contributor to the Mountain Xpress.