As social media grows more toxic, college athletes ask themselves: Is it worth it?

toggle caption Timothy D. Easley/AP

In real life, it's hard to imagine that a stranger would decide to harass Cam Corhen.

Corhen is 21 years old and 6 feet, 10 inches tall. He's got 235 pounds of muscle draped across his broad frame. And he's a Division I college athlete: a forward for the Pittsburgh Panthers men's basketball team, averaging 15 points per game.

On the internet, though, none of that stops people.

The harassment of athletes on social media has become an epidemic, an experience so common that players today accept it as a fact of life.

College basketball players are more at risk than athletes in other sports, the NCAA has found, especially around March Madness, when thousands of abusive or threatening messages flood athletes, many of them from gamblers — some of it so severe and alarmingly specific that the NCAA must alert law enforcement.

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The toll it takes, players say, has become difficult to bear. Fighting through tears after his Wildcats lost last March to end a disappointing season, Kansas State's Coleman Hawkins said the online criticism had gotten to him. "I did a poor job of letting people talk about me and affect my play," he said, sobbing. "I wish I could just go back and block out everything."

When the name, image and likeness door was thrown open for college athletes, social media promised to be a cash cow. Build a personal brand with a following on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, and lucrative sponsorship deals would soon come rolling in.

But as harassment and threats have grown, players (and coaches