Basketball culture has always been a little more… wild than other sports. Not to say that other sports aren’t always wild, but basketball’s fandom has always been one of the craziest of them all, much like the atmosphere of European soccer. It should be a simple fix, but media accounts such as Overtime and Ballislife only fuel the fire.
Before diving into the issues of what these accounts are doing, it is important to have some background on each. Overtime Sports, founded in 2016 by Dan Porter and Zack Weiner, appeals to Generation Z’s sports fans; they originally posted short videos at high school games captured on iPhone cameras. Through this, they were able to give limelight to future NBA Stars such as Zion Williamson and Trae Young among others, which may be a big reason why those two only played one year in college. Overtime currently has 10 million followers on their main accounts and around 4.3 million on all of their others, which have expanded to include Overtime WBB and the professional basketball league Overtime Elite. Ballislife, on the other hand, has been around since 2005 and describes itself as “Grown from a ‘Mixtape’ outlet to respected basketball apparel, media, and event management company.” They constantly cover high school basketball, and their content appears on sites such as The New York Times, and ESPN’s SportsCenter.
It is important to understand that this is not intended in any way to be an attack on the two. Overtime and Ballislife have built their brands for years to get to where they are today, and it is hard not to respect them for it. But, they are playing a role in the toxicity that a simple sports fandom is becoming. This toxicity can include things as casual as chants that poke fun like the ‘Who’s Your Daddy’ chant during the Nuggets and Lakers’ first matchup of the 2023-24 season, or it could be as hardcore as the fights that took place after the Eaglecrest vs. Smoky Hill basketball game that hospitalized one student.
As one junior put it, “It was not necessarily and very immature. Getting into a fight over losing a game does not make me proud to be an Eaglecrest student. I hope everyone who was in that fight is okay and that something like this doesn’t happen again.” It is even scary to think, that is FAR from the worst thing to happen after a game doesn’t go someone’s way.
Basketball culture over the years has become more about the hype and the stunts, rather than just winning the championship. Yes, an NBA title is still an achievement to get, but more often than not, any controversial event that takes place during a game will get more clicks than the Nuggets winning their first NBA Title. As a result, more posts regarding the incident, and more impressionable children think that the behavior demonstrated by their favorite NBA player is okay. Take the Ja Morant incident for example; the factor that divided people wasn’t the fact that he shook a gun around on camera, but the fact that nobody knows if there are any redeeming qualities for him doing it. Some will say that he shouldn’t be given a platform if that is what he is going to show to his impressionable audience, and others will say that he shouldn’t have to worry about it because it is hard for people to be role models, and he simply made a mistake. Either way, he was suspended for the first 25 games of the 2023-24 season, and in his return, he seemed to have calmed down, but the amount of coverage the incident got has undeniably damaged his reputation and left a for the worse impression on his followers.
Take the incident that happened after the Eaglecrest vs. Smoky Hill basketball game; not many people, if anybody knew how it started, but fights flared up in and outside of Eaglecrest, and one person was hospitalized after reportedly suffering from a seizure. But, that small event was covered by many of the big news sites, who even included the videos of the fight, 9News, FOX31, and Sentinel Colorado just to name a few. It shows that even the big sites that are in charge of presenting big news are susceptible to showing these events. There is nothing about the game itself in most of these articles, and in the aftermath of this incident, the lack of emphasis on the game’s details in the news coverage raises questions about the media’s priorities and the potential impact on the perception of such events. The story had become more about the violence that transpired during the event, instead of a typical basketball game that went south in the end. Thanks to the media.
