Win Big or Go Home: Sports Gambling Among Youth

By Sophie Gvenetadze ‘28

The global appeal for professional sports comes from its ability to allow viewers to experience greatness from the sidelines. There is something compelling about judging world-class athletes from the comfort of our couches and sharing the thrilling “us versus them” mentality with millions of fellow fans. Such strong feelings fuel watchers’ need to interact with the sports they adore past simply making snarky comments at their TVs. For 22% of Americans in 2025, that need for involvement has taken the form of sports betting, per the Siena Research Institute. Due to the natural human risk-reward instinct, the practice of betting on the outcome of sports has been around for just as long as organized competitions have themselves. Informal wagers were placed on players at the oldest Olympic Games. These wagers then evolved to the practice of bookmaking and the establishment of betting shops with horse races. Eventually, the “point spread” was created in the US to make betting on football and basketball more accessible.

For decades, sports betting was illegal nationwide in the US under a 1992 federal law called The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA). In 2018, however, the Supreme Court struck down PASPA, after which states have gradually been legalizing the practice of betting on sports. Massachusetts, for example, was one of the last states to legalize it, which it did in August 2022. As of 2025, thirty-nine states have legalized sports gambling in some form. Additionally, the twenty-first century saw a massive transformation in sports betting due to the development of technology and online betting platforms. In-game wagering, for example, has helped transform the industry into the million-dollar business it is today. As the mechanics of sports gambling have developed and the practice of it authorized globally, the appeal for it has increased significantly. According to the American Gaming Association, legal sportsbooks took nearly $150 billion worth of bets in 2024, a 22% increase from the preceding year.

But what are the demographics of this wave of gamblers? Sports bettors tend to be young, male, and wealthy; per Birches Health, 39% of gamblers are under the age of twenty-five, 69% of them are male, and 44% are earning more than $100k per year. Alarmingly, gambling demographics have skewed younger and younger in recent years: due to advertising by online betting companies, teen sports fans have increasingly associated sports with gambling. Today’s desperate gamblers are not the same old, sophisticated men from decades past; many are students who have gambled away student loan money or family inheritances in hopes of winning big overnight.

Furthermore, the effects of sports gambling are surely and notably making their way into tight-knit, academically rigorous communities like Milton Academy. Bella Baez ‘28, a Milton Girls’ Varsity Basketball player, stated that even in youth sports, predicting and taking risks on the outcomes of games are not uncommon. “At club basketball tournaments,” she said, “sometimes random people that none of [her teammates] knew would come to cheer for [them] or against [them] because [the spectators] had placed bets with their friends before.” She also added that “it was uncomfortable for [them] to play with all that added pressure, especially from strangers.” Amanee Dixon ‘28 had similar thoughts, saying that“at [her] old school, [...] kids would place bets on [their] own teams with real money and get into a lot of trouble with their parents when they couldn’t win it back.” When asked why she thought students gambled, Dixon stated that “teens do it because they think it’s fun. They never even consider that it’s possible they’re going to lose the money.”

Sports betting is a rapidly growing industry, profiting from people’s enjoyment of sports and their desire to engage with the excitement personally. It does have a flip side, though, offering huge amounts of money for the very few who get lucky while costing countless others their lifetime savings. Combining two major societal domains, the increasing popularity of sports gambling among today’s youth is shaping the future of entertainment and how people interact with sports in the coming decades, with alarming effects.