Scan the NCAA’s Sweet 16 rosters and you’ll see what college basketball has always known: Black athletes built this tournament. Now imagine if their institutions invested in their minds the way they profit from their bodies.
Each March, college basketball becomes a unifying cultural event unlike almost anything else in American life. Group chats fill with bracket talk. Entire cities rally behind teams in ways that transcend sport , connecting generations and giving communities something to believe in
together.
This is March Madness.
The Stakes Behind the Spectacle
The tournament represents the culmination of a lifetime of sacrifice and discipline. It is a moment of genuine joy and achievement, and it deserves to be celebrated. As a developmental scientist who studies the racialized experiences of young people in academic and digital spaces however, I cannot watch it the same way most fans do. Many of these young people are working, strategically, to change the material conditions for themselves and their families. The court is their vehicle for access to economic opportunity. The stakes attached to every game, every season, every tournament run are existential — and it is taking a toll on their mental health.
It’s time that colleges and universities move beyond rhetoric and take meaningful steps to protect the mental wellbeing of these student athletes.
A Disproportionate Burden
Black athletes are dramatically overrepresented in NCAA basketball. While often constituting less than 10% of the general undergraduate student body at many large NCAA Division 1 institutions, they make up 43% of NCAA men’s basketball and 28% of women’s basketball players on the floor. And yet the particular pressures they carry into those arenas, the racialized scrutiny they absorb, and the structural vulnerabilities they navigate are rarely part of the conversation happening in broadcast booths or comment sections.
New research tracking trends in college students’ mental health paints a sobering picture. Mental health among college students has been declining steadily, with female students, minoritized students, and those experiencing financial hardship bearing a disproportionate share of the distress. These demographic categories, often seen as abstract, actually describe, with striking precision, a significant portion of the athletes we cheer for every spring.
The athletes themselves understand this acutely. Howard University guard, Ose Okojie, put it plainly in a recent interview: “A lot of times people go into these games and just look at the name on the jersey instead of realizing they are humans just like me.”
The Weight of Public Scrutiny
What Black student athletes endure during March Madness is an intensified, accelerated version of what many already experience. Thousands of comments about a single game. Analysis of not just their performance, but their bodies, their expressions, their social media presence. Opinions delivered without accountability or the basic recognition that the person on the receiving end is a human being.
Consider Audi Crooks, Iowa State’s dominant center, who has averaged 25.8 points, 7.7 rebounds, and 1.7 assists per game this season, placing her among the elite players in the country, regardless of gender.
And yet woven into coverage of her extraordinary season has been a persistent, dehumanizing thread of commentary about her body. She is being scrutinized for the shape of her frame at the same moment she is carrying her program.
This is not an isolated case. Black athletes regularly find that their excellence invites a particular kind of public examination that reaches beyond their athletic performance into their bodies, their character, and their identities.
What Real Support Would Look Like
So what do we do with this?
As someone who studies how environments shape the development and well-being of young people, I’m interested in what protection, support, and accountability actually look like. Having a sports psychologist on staff is a baseline. Athletic programs need culturally responsive mental health support including practitioners who understand the racialized and financial dimensions of what their athletes are navigating.
Black student athletes should have access to care that does not require a visible crisis to justify. And they need coaches, administrators, and athletic directors who treat player well-being as a program priority instead of liability management.
Media organizations bear responsibility too. The way athletes are framed shapes public perception and fuels online behavior. Reducing a Black athlete’s story to their physicality, their background, or their failures rather than the full arc of their humanity is an editorial choice and one that has consequences far beyond the comment section.
The Role of Fans — and Everyone Else
And we, as fans watching from living rooms and sports bars and arena seats, have a role to play. The parasocial intimacy that sports inspires does not grant access to an athlete’s body, psyche, or private life. Okojie’s words are worth sitting with: these players are humans just like us. We can hold passionate opinions about the game without weaponizing them against the people playing it.
Beyond the Buzzer-Beater
This March, as you watch the games, as you feel the electricity of a buzzer-beater and the agony of an upset, hold one thought alongside all of it: these are young people; they are students. They are sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, friends. They carry dreams that belong to more than just themselves. And they are doing all of this under a level of public scrutiny that most of us will never experience.
The shot that wins the game will be celebrated for years. What happens to the young person who takes it matters just as much. It is time our systems, our media, and our fandom reflected that.
Dr. Ashley Stewart is a developmental scientist and the inaugural American Institutes of Research Health Equity Research Fellow at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. She is also a Public Voices Fellow with The Op-ed Project, in partnership with the National Black Child Development Institute.