This year’s (2023 for future readers) Women’s College World Series (WCWS) was another huge score for the sport. The TV coverage overall drew an average of 1.1 million viewers per game, up 6% over last year according to Sports Business Journal, while the championship game peaked with 2.3 million viewers.

What tremendous visibility for our sport! Yet as it grows in popularity there is an unfortunate, unintended consequence that comes with it: an marked in increase in harsh and just downright mean comments about the 18 to 22 year old women who play the game.

You see, with the size of the spectacle comes an increased dissociation of the player we see from the human being she is. When you don’t think of the player as a real person, it’s easy to criticize her based on the observer’s impossibly high expectations of perfection.

In other words, the standards that are often applied to highly paid professional athletes with years of experience are now being used to measure the performance and value of young women who are just beginning to come of age. That doesn’t feel right to me.

Yet it’s not just these high-level college players who are feeling the sting of these harsh and sometimes even troll-level comments, often delivered by people who never picked up a ball and competed themselves. They’re also being directed at lower-level college, high school and even younger players in social media and softball-related forums and websites.

Now consider that according to the National Institute of Mental Health, the human brain doesn’t finish developing until a person is in their mid-to-late 20s. (And for the people I’m talking about in this post it may never fully develop.)

What that means is you have unthinking people lobbing terrible comments at adolescents and young adults whose brains may not be equipped to handle them. It may not feel personal to the stranger making the comment – after all, these are just images on a screen or random players on a field to them – but it can feel VERY personal to those on the receiving end.

Consider the college player who makes an error at a critical time that contributes to a loss that knocks her team out of the WCWS. (It doesn’t cause the loss because in the course of the game there were plenty of opportunities to make that error meaningless, but happening when it does puts it in the spotlight).

She feels bad enough about it already. But then someone she doesn’t know has to go and call her out in a way that is rude and classless to make him/herself look smart or superior.

What the commentor doesn’t know is this young woman may already be suffering from significant self-doubt or even full-on Imposter Syndrome. That comment might be enough to put her over the edge to where it affects more than her ability to play softball.

Because underneath the uniform is a real human being with a real story and real feelings of her own. She didn’t mean to make the error, she worked really hard on her game so she wouldn’t make that error, but sometimes it still occurs.

Some of these rude commentators like to get even more personal about it because it makes them feel big. They’ll go into a public forum and paraphrase a line from the Mighty Ducks 2, saying a player with a larger body size would have caught that pop-up if it was a cheeseburger.

They may think they’re being funny, but to an athlete already dealing with body or other self-image issues, these types of hurtful comments can be devastating.

It’s not that they’re snowflakes, because in the course of their day they are likely dealing with a lot of pressure from all sides and handling it well. But we all have chinks in our armor, and that’s one that can end up ripping a pretty big hole if the player already has a negative self-image.

Look, everyone has a story, and even if you see a profile on ESPN you’re not getting the whole story. Just the part of it everyone wants to highlight. Like a duck on the water it may look calm on top, but underneath there’s a lot of churning going on.

Before you choose to criticize or comment on a player in a harsh way, stop and think. Is this the way I’d want someone talking about me, or my wife, daughter, sister, etc.?

Remember that all those players you’re watching aren’t just images in a video game. They’re real, live human beings with real, live feelings and all their own personal stuff they’re going through.

If you feel the need, criticize the play but not the player. It’s simply the right thing to do.

Internet troll graphic: Simplicius (talk · contribs); derivative work by odder, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons