If you have watched a football or basketball game lately, you already know the landscape has changed. The ads, the credits, the constant invitation to “get in on the action.” It is woven into the broadcast itself now. What I had not fully connected until I sat down for a recent episode of The Table with Saul Malek was how directly that same machinery is reaching our students.
Saul has become one of the country’s emerging voices on the modern gambling landscape. He developed a gambling addiction as a college sophomore, lost a significant amount of money and very nearly his life, and has been in recovery since 2019. Today, he speaks to schools, colleges, and athlete mental health organizations across the country, and his message is refreshingly clear: he is not anti-gambling, he is pro-education.
That distinction matters for those of us in schools, because the instinct when we encounter a new risk is often to ban it and move on. Saul’s perspective, drawn from both his own recovery and his work on campuses, is that prohibition alone does not protect students. Understanding does. Here is what stood out to me from our conversation, and what I think school leaders should be sitting with.
This Is Not the Gambling We Grew Up Picturing
When I think of a bookie, I picture someone in a dark corner, cigarette in hand. Saul gently corrected that image. The bookie that pulled him in was just another college student who could set up an account. From there, the access only widened.
That is the heart of why student gambling is so different now. As Saul described it, online accessibility has compressed the entire timeline of addiction. It is available around the clock, lives on the same phone students use for everything else, and requires no physical place to go. The speed at which a casual habit becomes a compulsion has accelerated in a way that should reframe how we think about risk on our campuses.
It Starts Earlier Than Most of Us Assume
One of the more sobering points Saul raised is how young this is starting. He referenced a figure from the National Council on Problem Gambling indicating that a large share of high school students reported gambling for money in the past year. He was candid that the exact criteria behind such surveys can vary, but the broader point holds: this is widely accessible to teenagers.
What surprised even him was how far down it now reaches. He is seeing it in middle schools, often in forms that do not look like gambling at all. Think of a child spending real money inside a video game to unlock an item of unknown value. Saul makes the case that this is functionally gambling, even if it is not legally defined that way, and that parents who buy those credits frequently do not see the harm. For those of us thinking about student wellness, that reframe is worth holding onto. The behavior can begin long before a student ever places a recognizable bet.
Why It Is So Easy to Miss
We are reasonably good at spotting the vices we know. As Saul put it, a school can walk into a room, identify substances by sight or smell, and respond accordingly. Gambling offers no such evidence. There is nothing to see or smell, which makes it remarkably easy to hide.
He offered a few signals worth watching for:
- Sleep disruption. Students showing up exhausted may be up at odd hours, placing bets, sometimes on overseas games, or simply not resting because of the constant pull.
- Money pressure. A student frequently asking peers for money can be a red flag, though Saul acknowledged that it’s harder for an administrator to catch in the flow of a school day.
- The language. If you overhear students talking about parlays, the odds, or the over-under in hallways and locker rooms, that vocabulary tells you something.
- Depression. The emotional weight that often accompanies gambling addiction can show up the way other struggles do, which is part of what makes it so easy to misattribute.
The challenge, as Saul named it, is that nearly every one of these signs could be explained by something else. A tired, stressed, withdrawn student reads as a tired, stressed, withdrawn student. We rarely connect those dots to gambling.
Build It Into What You Already Do
Saul’s most practical suggestion here was one I appreciated for its simplicity: add gambling screening questions to your existing health intake forms. Rather than asking faculty to become digital detectives, you build a quiet, consistent point of contact into a system you already run. It gives you a clearer picture without putting the burden on individual adults to catch something nearly invisible.
He was also realistic about limits. Many schools are moving phone free, which helps, and schools can educate students and monitor accessible websites. But he was honest that there is a ceiling to what any institution can control. That honesty is useful. It keeps us from either ignoring the issue or overpromising a solution we cannot deliver.
Get the Handbook Right First
When I asked what the first concrete steps should be, Saul went straight to policy, and I think he is right. His first recommendation is to amend the student handbook to address gambling directly.
His reasoning is sound. If a school issues a proclamation that students may not gamble, but it is not in the handbook, the message lacks weight. Future communication, education, and consequences must be consistent with a policy that actually exists on paper. Everything else builds from that foundation.
Balance Accountability With a Path to Help
This is where the conversation got genuinely nuanced, and where I think school leaders will need to do their own thinking. Saul believes schools should still enforce consequences for students caught gambling. At the same time, he is a strong advocate for a reporting structure in which a student who self-reports or reports a struggling friend faces fewer or different consequences.
This is familiar territory for those of us who have built medical amnesty or safe harbor approaches around drugs and alcohol. The principle is the same. If the first thing a student in crisis receives is a suspension, the next student will not come forward at all. We can hold students accountable and still make it safe to ask for help. Those two things are not in conflict, and Saul agreed that drawing that distinction sharpened his own philosophy.
A related point he raised about supporting peers: students should learn how to help a friend without enabling the addiction, which means not bailing them out or paying off their debts. That is a teachable skill, and it belongs in the conversation we have with students directly.
Gambling Education Belongs in More Than Health Class
One of the more interesting threads Saul pulled was the idea that gambling lends itself to education in ways other risk topics do not. There is a math and finance component here that simply does not exist with substances. You can teach the numbers, the probability, and the structural reason a bettor cannot win over time. Saul argued that this opens the door to weaving the topic into more than a single health unit.
He was equally clear about what does not work. A preachy message that gambling is simply evil will not land with students. What he advocates instead is helping students recognize the difference between a low-stakes, occasional choice and a behavior that is slowly slipping out of their control, and offering healthier alternatives that meet the same social and emotional needs. The goal he keeps returning to is agency: helping students feel they have the power to choose something better rather than feeling outmatched by an enormous industry.
Do Not Forget Athletics and Coaches
Saul does a great deal of work in athletic settings, and what he shared there stuck with me.. After a program with a group of high school athletic directors, he came away with the sense that many did not grasp the magnitude of the issue for athletes and coaches.
The detail that stayed with me came from one of those directors, who observed that coaches are sometimes part of the problem without realizing it. Talking about last night’s game and the betting around it can be a way coaches bond with their athletes. That makes departmental culture a real lever. The question Saul poses is whether the culture in your athletic program is quietly contributing to the problem or actively contributing to the solution.
There is also the matter of how cruel people have become toward athletes who, in a bettor’s eyes, cost them money. The harassment student athletes face when a game does not go a gambler’s way is genuinely disturbing, and it is part of why athletic departments cannot treat this as someone else’s issue.
Bring Parents Into the Same Message
Saul made the case that parent education is not optional. If the message students hear at school is not reinforced at home, it does not stick. Many parents, he noted, underestimate how significant the consequences of youth gambling can be, and how even a small bet placed alongside a parent can raise a child’s later risk. Parents also tend to miss how deeply this is tied to social networks and friendships, particularly for young men, which means it is far less isolated than they assume.
The practical takeaway is congruence. When the handbook, the classroom, the coaching staff, and the dinner table are all sending the same message, students are far more likely to absorb it.
A Final Thought
What I keep coming back to from this conversation is Saul’s reframe from prohibition to education. We are not going to ban our way out of an industry this large and this embedded. What we can do is build clear policy, fold smart screening into the systems we already run, teach students the math and the warning signs, make it genuinely safe to ask for help, and make sure parents and coaches carry the same message we do.
If this is the first time gambling has landed on your radar as a student wellness issue, you are not behind; you are right on time. The work now is to treat it with the same seriousness we have learned to bring to every other risk our students navigate.
You can learn more about Saul Malek’s work, or bring him to your campus, at SaulMalek.com.
