Almost always seen on the court with a bright smile across her face, Iowa women’s basketball player Hannah Stuelke has earned herself the fan-created mantra: Happy Like Hannah.
However, the positivity Stuelke brings to the court is not always returned in the comments nor messages the third-year forward receives on social media.
On Jan. 21, 2024, Stuelke’s dad posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that Stuelke had deleted her entire Instagram account after a disappointing loss to Ohio State due to the harmful comments she received within just an hour after the Hawkeyes left the court.
“There’s a lot of people out there who don’t understand how much work we put in and how hard it is mentally just to get through really difficult games,” Stuelke said in an interview with The Daily Iowan. “There’s a lot of keyboard warriors who will just get online and say whatever they feel, and they don’t understand how much it really affects us.”
To address the culture of online negativity surrounding herself and her fellow female athletes, Stuelke has partnered with UScellular on a Name, Image, and Likeness, or NIL, campaign aimed at creating positive female role models for young girls and promoting positivity and celebration of women’s athletics.
Iowa State women’s basketball star Audi Crooks is also part of the campaign.
“There’s people like UScellular who want to get this message out, and partnering with them within NIL has been truly amazing,” Stuelke said. “Being able to speak to younger audiences and people who are just like me going through the same thing has been a great opportunity for me.”
Emma Calow, associate professor in the University of Iowa’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, studies and teaches courses about inequities and social justice in women’s sports and female athletes’ portrayals in media.
Calow said female athletes’ accomplishments are often trivialized, and women are framed as not possessing natural athletic ability like men. Because of this, Calow said female athletes are three times more likely than their male counterparts to be the target of hate comments online.
“This cultural moment in which we’re in, in the context of women sports, it’s actually been driven by social media engagement by fans, male and female alike,” Calow said. “So, it’s interesting in that on one hand, we have social media playing as this vehicle for proliferating the celebration. On the other hand, the nature of social media also invites people to say what they want to say whenever they want to say it, reinforcing those dominant narratives that women are crappy athletes.”
As women’s basketball, specifically at the University of Iowa, has gained massive popularity in the last year due to the Caitlin Clark effect, Stuelke and the rest of the Iowa team have seen an influx of negative attention along with the long-deserved recognition.
“With more attention comes more negativity in any circumstance, so learning how to navigate that has been interesting for all of us,” Stuelke said. “The game has expanded so much over the past years, and just being able to be in this environment and have more attention has been amazing. But everything comes with its downsides.”
Kaylie Tverberg, a first-year sports and recreation management major at the UI, said she has noticed an influx of hate comments on female athletes’ accounts since the Iowa’s women’s basketball team has gained national popularity.
However, Tverberg thinks the impact athletes can make for their community outweighs the negativity of random social media users.
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“Popularity of female sports and female athletes is still relatively new, so I think it’s important for them to have some sort of social media because it gets their face out more, and it brings even more recognition to female athletes,” Tverberg said. “If they didn’t have them, people may be even less inclined to watch female sports because people these days like to follow the people they watch and the people they look up to.”
UI School of Journalism and Mass Communication Associate Professor Brian Ekdale said with any popular team or player, online sports fandoms are generally toxic, and negativity is virtually unavoidable.
However, female athletes are even more susceptible to hate because women as a whole are more often the targets of stereotypes and discrimination online.
“Outside of sports, women and people of color are much more likely to get attacked and criticized on social media,” Ekdale said. “So, you have a situation in which women’s sports is growing in popularity, women and people of color are being attacked more normally on social media, and you bring those together, and it creates a really toxic combination.”
To cope with the added stress of battling hate online, Calow said it is crucial for female athletes to support each other and create a circle of people who can share negative experiences and relate to one another.
For Stuelke, this support has come from Iowa women’s basketball head coach Jan Jensen, the program’s other supporting staff, and her teammates at Iowa.
“Our coaches are always preaching, ‘hang up and hang out,’” Stuelke said. “It’s very important for us to put down our phones and make real relationships and avoid all the bad things that are out there because there’s a lot of them.”
Ekdale said coping with social media hate really shouldn’t be the responsibility of the athletes but the responsibility of users who attack young women.
“It’s heartbreaking to hear these stories of people who feel like they can’t participate in spaces because the rest of us have ruined it for them,” he said. “Maybe someone says in the NIL era, they should have thicker skin, but at the end of the day, these are 19, 20-year-olds. They’re still pretty young, right? It’s the rest of us that need to grow up.”