Throughout the 2023-2024 year of college athletics, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) participated in a pilot study aimed at identifying abuse of athletes on social media. During the study, the AI program run by Signify Group identified 1.3 million posts that were abusive to college athletes; of these messages, eighty percent were posted during the annual basketball tournament, March Madness.

In addition to the millions of messages directed towards college and professional athletes, personal digs and mentions on throw-away X accounts, and insensitive chants from the student section are becoming more commonplace in high school athletics.

“In person, people are too scared to say something negative, but behind the screen, it’s just so easy,” said Ankeny High Senior Zach Breitbach. “It feels like there are no repercussions.”

Important to remember is that this abuse and negativity is directed at athletes, in particular young athletes who can be susceptible to abusive remarks.

Breitbach, a offensive lineman for the Ankeny Hawks, explained that “as an athlete, it [the negativity] affects you more than normal.”

This negativity seems like the typical American attitude towards sports. As previously reported by the Talon in a March 2025 story discussing Coaching and Officiating, youth sports are battling a referee shortage, in part due to the negativity and the pressure parents place on athletes.

“We used to have baseball games where we would have one umpire at a time, just because they couldn’t get enough of these umpires and had to split them between games. […] If it wasn’t for the negativity, I probably would have become an Umpire,” said Ankeny High Senior Maddox Smith.

This amount of hatred and negativity is not uncommon in today’s world of sports. Smith shared his concern with this rising amount of negativity.

“As a sports fan, you don’t want to see that stuff (negativity), you want to see the good stuff,” Smith explained.

This trend of increasing negativity is not only within the fanbases but also in the Sports Media industry. A recent report shows that around 39% of global audiences in 2024 actively avoided the news due to its negative tone. However, from a business perspective, the negativity sells. In 2023, the journal Nature Human Behavior published a study that showed negative words increased the click-through rate of an online news publication by 2.3% while a headline of average length had a decline of 1.0% per positive word.

“Negative headlines for them (the media industry), the negativity is good, but, the way I look at it is, it’s not good, because you really shouldn’t be promoting that stuff,” Smith explained.

Smith is a part of a growing collective of fans who are fed up with this promotion of negativity by the media industry. As a devoted Chicago Cubs fan, Smith has experienced a lot of great moments that define his fandom. Smith remembers the day 17 minutes of rain ended a 108-year drought. He remembers the first time he met his favorite Major League Baseball (MLB) player, Kris Bryant. Smith, like many others, believes it is these positive moments that the media should focus on.

In a media industry that’s so focused on negativity, here enters Adam Doucette. The founder of sports media startup, Default Positive.

Doucette started the company with one goal. Make sports fun again by posting short-form content focusing on the fun and positive stories across the sports world. Doucette posted his first video in May of 2024, but his dream of challenging the industry standard started far before that. Doucette entered Northeastern University in Boston as undecided on his major, but certain on two things: his love for Boston sports and music. Doucette bounced around for a while, and working for the Boston Globe showed him the insides of the industry.

“It was like a movie walking up the stairs for the first time,” Doucette said.
Doucette’s time at the Globe left him with industry experience and a desire for something more.

Come alive they have, Doucette has gained over 80 thousand followers across all platforms, and he is hardly close to being finished. With more followers every day, the demand for positive content is clearly increasing, and Doucette’s dream is far from complete. With new videos every day and major collaborations in the works, the demand for positive media is growing. With the professionals, fans, and athletes leaning towards positivity, the tides could be shifting toward positivity. Regardless one thing is certain, change is happening, challenging how fans and the media alike view sports.