AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — William & Mary's Anahi-Lee Cauley is playing in her school's first NCAA Tournament in the biggest moment of her career just a month after one of the worst.
It was her foul on a 3-point shooter at the buzzer that set up the game-winning free throws in a loss to rival Drexel, which would start a losing skid.
A later check of her social media only made things worse. That's when she found multiple messages telling her she was terrible, and some even suggesting she die.
The Tribe's senior forward was among the latest college athlete subjected to online abuse from fans who are taunting them or angry about a defeat or gambling losses.
“To have somebody say those hurtful words, it was a shock. I don't know you,” Cauley said Friday as the No. 16-seed Tribe (16-18) prepared to play No. 1 seed Texas (31-3) in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.
“Those are tough words to hear when you are by yourself looking at your phone," Cauley said. “I started deleting them.”
Cauley's case is far from unique. Professional and high-level college athletes are routinely exposed to rough treatment online.
That it would happen to a player at a school scrapping through the Colonial Athletic Association shows just how far it can reach, and the effects that can ripple through a team when it happens.
The Drexel loss was first of four in a row, and the Tribe’s season started spinning out of control.
Cauley would only describe the messages in general terms but said she kept them to herself for a few days. She eventually brought it up during a team meeting during the losing skid.
“They all had my back,” Cauley said.
William & Mary coach Erin Dickerson Davis called the messages “really nasty.”
“And she was a wreck,” Dickerson Davis said. "Filled with guilt. She’s 22 and didn’t mean to make that mistake. Mistakes happen in basketball. To get messages like that put her in a nasty space. She is our emotional leader on the team that completely rocked her and us.”
The motivation behind the messages was never clear, Cauley said. She never figured out if they were just mean taunts, or from angry gamblers who lost money on a bet.
The NCAA is trying to address the issue of online abuse from gamblers during the men's and women's tournaments that draw big betting action. The NCAA this week launched a “ Don't Be A Loser ” campaign for tournament broadcasts and online that aims to curb abuse directed at players by fans who lost bets.
According to the American Gaming Association, an estimated $3.1 billon will be legally bet on this year’s basketball tournaments, doubling the amount bet on the Super Bowl.
Cauley and the Tribe have recovered well from the abuse and the losing streak. They won the CAA Tournament to earn their automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament, then beat High Point on Thursday night to set up their matchup with Texas.
Cauley scored eight points and grabbed four rebounds in a rematch with Drexel in the CAA semifinals, a 22-point victory. She went into that game with the previous loss, and the online abuse, weighing in the back of her mind.
“We had this mindset that the tournament was our ultimate revenge tour,” Cauley said.
The pressure of the men's and women's tournaments will only build over the next few weeks. Each win, each loss, each shot made or missed with stir emotions. That means other athletes will be targeted with online abuse, Cauley said.
“Don’t deal with it on your own. Lean on your tribe, the people who love you and know what you’ve been through, who know the hours you put on the court and know your morals,” she said.
AP Basketball Writer Doug Feinberg contributed.
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William & Mary guard Bella Nascimento (5) celebrates with teammates including Natalie Fox (21), Aislinn Gibson (11), Monet Dance (2) and Jana Sallman (12) after their win over High Point in a First Four college basketball game in the NCAA Tournament in Austin, Texas, Thursday, March 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
