As the top prospects came together for the 2025 WNBA Draft earlier this week, Commissioner Cathy Engelbert announced the formation of a dedicated task force to combat the rampant online harassment plaguing women’s sport.
“We want to ensure that the WNBA remains a space where everyone, players, fans and corporate partners, feel safe, valued and empowered,” Engelbert stated, addressing what has become one of women’s sports’ most damaging challenges.
The announcement comes amid a time when social media, gambling, and NIL trends are converging to generate the perfect storm for online abuse directed at athletes, particularly women. A recent study published in Performance Enhancement & Health noted that women basketball players receive three times the amount of online abuse compared to their men counterparts, with content of a sexual nature accounting for 18% of all detected abuse. Sexist comments made up 14% and racist content 10%.
Hailey Van Lith, who was selected No.11 overall by the Chicago Sky, expressed appreciation for the league’s proactive approach. “It feels good to join a league that’s not only concerned about the level of play, but also how we’re functioning as humans,” Van Lith said.
Understanding The Scale Of The Problem
The online harassment of women athletes represents a disturbing intersection of sports fandom, social media visibility, and gender-based discrimination. The disturbing reality of this issue came into sharper focus recently when a comprehensive NCAA study monitored over 3,000 social media accounts belonging to student-athletes, coaches, and officials. Through the use of artificial intelligence, millions of posts were analyzed and uncovered thousands of abusive messages targeting college athletes, with women’s basketball players receiving approximately three times more threats than men.
“There’s no space for hate,” Commissioner Engelbert emphasized. “After last year, I think we just really wanted to do something… it was time to put this task force together and really hit it head-on.” This urgency stems from a growing recognition that online abuse isn’t merely unpleasant, but causes real psychological harm. Researchers define “virtual maltreatment” as communication designed to elicit fear, emotional and psychological upset, distress, alarm, or feelings of inferiority. The harmful impacts are particularly severe when abuse is sustained and in one documented case, a single college athlete received over 1,400 abusive messages in less than two weeks.
Last season, the issue reached a breaking point when New York Liberty star Breanna Stewart revealed that she and her wife Marta Xargay received threatening homophobic emails during the WNBA Finals. Similar incidents have affected countless players across women’s sports, with abuse ranging from sexualized comments to explicit death threats, particularly from disgruntled gamblers.
New Opportunities Create Increased Vulnerability
For today’s women athletes, social media presence is no longer optional. Since 2021, when college athletes were first permitted to profit from their name, image, and likeness, building an online brand has become a crucial economic component of an athlete’s career. Unfortunately, this dynamic has created a harmful catch-22 and the more successful a woman athlete becomes at building her brand and generating endorsement opportunities, the more exposed she becomes to potential online abuse.
Research indicates that increased social media exposure is directly linked to increased risk of harassment.
The situation is especially complicated for college athletes who depend on social media engagement for financial compensation. Studies show significant gaps in institutional support for athletes navigating the NIL landscape, with many women handling their social media and brand-building themselves. This lack of institutional protection and guidance leaves them particularly vulnerable to online abuse.
At the WNBA rookie orientation, Van Lith was introduced to one of the league’s new protective measures. “At our rookie orientation they showed us an app that they’re partnering with that will help filter hate comments off of our channels,” she explained. The former TCU guard highlighted a critical motivation for addressing this issue: “I think that’s important not only for us as the players to not see that, but also young women and young boys who are following us. They don’t want to see that on our page either when they look to us for inspiration.”
The growing sports betting market has introduced additional complexities as a significant portion of online harassment directed at athletes stems from betting-related frustrations. As prop betting (wagers placed on individual player and team performance metrics) has grown in popularity, so has targeted abuse toward specific players. College sports administrators and professional leagues are increasingly advocating for restrictions on certain bet types that create incentives for directly harassing individual athletes.
“We don’t need to expose them to that,” Van Lith emphasized, referring to young fans who look up to WNBA players. “And I think that’s what is most important is the next generation that is looking to us as inspiration, they don’t need to know that that is something that you go through. And I think that it’s amazing that the WNBA is putting support behind it.”
The WNBA’s Comprehensive Strategy
The WNBA’s approach to combat online hate represents one of the most comprehensive strategies undertaken by a professional sports league to date. According to Engelbert, the task force will implement a four-pronged approach:
- Advanced Monitoring Technology: Using AI and other tools to detect threatening or abusive content across social media and digital platforms.
- Strengthened Conduct Standards: Implementing more robust policies across WNBA platforms to establish clear expectations and consequences.
- Enhanced Security Measures: Providing additional protection at both league and team levels.
- Dedicated Mental Health Support: Making specialized clinicians available to players affected by online harassment.
As the 2025 WNBA season approaches, the league’s initiative send an important message that excellence on the court cannot come at the expense of athletes’ dignity and mental health off of it. For a league that has consistently positioned itself at the forefront of social progress, this task force represents another significant step forward. With the WNBA taking concrete steps to shield its players from such harm, they’re creating a model that other leagues and institutions could emulate. As Van Lith and her fellow rookies prepare to begin their professional careers, they do so with the knowledge that their league is committed not just to their athletic development, but to their holistic wellbeing in an increasingly complex digital landscape.
