As social media grows more toxic, college athletes ask themselves: Is it worth it?

Sports

Timothy D. Easley / AP

In real life, it's hard to imagine that a stranger would decide to harass Cam Corhen .

Corhen is 21 years old and 6 feet, 10 inches tall. He's got 235 pounds of muscle draped across his broad frame. And he's a Division I college athlete: a forward for the Pittsburgh Panthers men's basketball team, averaging 15 points per game.

On the internet, though, none of that stops people.

The harassment of athletes on social media has become an epidemic , an experience so common that players today accept it as a fact of life.

College basketball players are more at risk than athletes in other sports, the NCAA has found, especially around March Madness , when thousands of abusive or threatening messages flood athletes, many of them from gamblers — some of i