The House Never Loses

The invisible scourge of problem gambling, and one man who's shifting the odds.

Feature article from the Fall 2023 issue of Sacred Heart University Magazine

Last Fall, nine years after his graduation, Brian Dolan returned to Sacred Heart to take over the Collegiate Recovery Program, a facility that supports students battling addiction. Quite a lot had changed in the years since he last crossed the campus, but if there was any disorientation or anxiety, it had nothing to do with the new buildings or a shifting map. “There were a lot of tough memories here I had to face,” he recalls of the day.

He managed to join a game of basketball that was shy a player. It felt good to be back. Settling in amidst the familiar sounds––the shouts for passes and the thud of the ball against the backboard––Dolan tuned in to the students’ conversation. The subject? The NBA season. Nothing peculiar there. After a while, though, Dolan began to notice something strange. The students were using words that he had never heard being thrown around on campus. Words like “spread,” “pick ’em” and “parlay.” Gambling words. “Everybody,” he says, “could really speak the language.”

Though Dolan hasn’t placed a bet in six and a half years, he knows the score. During his own time at Sacred Heart, he struggled with a gambling addiction that he tried to conceal. It grew out of control and almost destroyed him. Back then, though, sports betting was facilitated by underground bookies, and gambling was relatively rare on campus. Hearing students use the terminology he knew all too well sent chills down his spine. It was, he realized, a signal of online betting’s stunning growth.

Since the 2018 U.S. Supreme Court case that paved the way for the legalization of sports gambling, online betting has boomed. Now legal in 37 states including Connecticut, placing a bet today requires little more than a smartphone and a credit card. Americans have been taking full advantage of the convenience. Over the five years since the ruling, gamblers have placed over $220 billion worth of bets. In 2023, advertising spend by sports bet makers is projected to reach $2 billion. The American Gaming Association has estimated that 18 percent of American adults will place a bet on the NFL this year. That’s a 40 percent increase from 2020.

This breathtaking expansion has a worrying dimension. There have been reports of college gamblers abusing and harassing athletes after losing money––and that includes when their team wins. In the first year of legalization, calls to Connecticut’s problem gambling helpline were up 203 percent, and many of the callers were college-age males.

Dolan sees the numbers as alarming. But when he looks to ascribe responsibility, blame falls on more than just the bookies and casinos and online platforms. While gambling advertising sells the thrill and adrenaline that come with winning, the truth is the risk of losing is ever present. Indeed, the very structure of a bet requires that most who gamble will lose. But they’re not just losing a game. They’re losing their money––some are forfeiting pocket money, but more than a few are losing their rent, their tuition, their homes.

What Dolan finds particularly alarming is the sports industry’s complicity. “Not only are they showing you the score of the game, but they’re showing you the spread on the game,” says Dolan, who also sits on Connecticut’s Council on Problem Gambling. “The sports media market is really attached to gambling. It’s a big problem.”

Even a single dollar bet on a football game transforms the gambler from viewer to participant, instantly elevating the immediacy of the game. Networks like viewers who gamble because they stay hooked on the game and the broadcast. Those eyes, firmly glued to the set, are valuable to advertisers. In short, the networks peddle their audience to both the farmers and the butchers.

But the problem, however fast it’s growing, is still under the radar. An alcohol or drug addiction is difficult to hide, but there is no drug test for whether somebody is a problem gambler. A group of friends who have serious gambling problems, Dolan says, often just looks like a group of guys watching the game. Clues emerge from the language they use and from visible emotions, like anger or anxiety. But compared to substance abuse, “students are able to mask it for longer.” This makes the dependency ever more dangerous, says Dolan, because “addiction wants to make you feel very alone.”

Growing up, Dolan had always been told that college was going to be the highlight of his life. “It was always: ‘Go to college! You’ll have so much fun!’” But Dolan’s experience spiraled into a frightening ordeal. Arriving in Fairfield from the Berkshires in 2009, he began to experiment with drink and drugs. To fund the habit, he started betting on sports.

Soon gambling took over his life. Often, he would wake up hung over, calling his family to ask them to bail him out of his gambling debts. He missed a midterm because he was at the bookies’. “I felt so much guilt and shame,” he says, which isolated him from his loved ones. Soon, Dolan felt he was ensnared in a life-threatening situation. Whether from an overdose or from suicide, “I got to a point where I was really close to dying,” he says. He was terrified of walking out of his front door in case he bumped into somebody who he owed money, and knew he needed to make a change. “But I didn’t know anybody who was in recovery. I didn’t even know what that word meant.”

After graduation, Dolan moved to New York City, where he spent his days and nights betting. Without the structure of college, his life was even more chaotic. He estimates that, in total, he lost several hundred thousand dollars to the bookies, mainly borrowing money from his family.

In 2017, Dolan finally found a treatment center that could help him with his gambling, and today Dolan has not drunk alcohol, taken drugs or gambled for six and a half years. Getting to this point has been a daily struggle.

Now, as the director of the Collegiate Recovery Program, Dolan can finally walk around campus with a clear head and an empowering purpose. He spends his time supporting SHU students who have found themselves in that terrifying place he knows all too well. “I would never have thought that I’d be doing this work,” he says. “I’m super passionate about it. It’s something that I live and breathe.”

Announced in 2021, the Collegiate Recovery Program launched this spring. It offers students who wish to be free from addiction the opportunity to live in the Recovery House, a four-bedroom residence with a live-in house manager. Each student is assigned a recovery coach, and residents meet weekly with a therapist. “It’s about helping to support those who have chosen a recovery lifestyle,” says Dolan. “We provide accountability, first and foremost. But also, my job is connecting students with other people in the recovery community, trying to normalize recovery across campus.”

Thanks to Dolan, a support structure now exists that can include those who may be problem gamblers. “When I was a student, we were never told about problem gambling,” he says. Now, Dolan is saying out loud what people have been too nervous to hear. Problem gambling is real, and it is dangerous, he says. And we should not be afraid to face it.

Dolan has now settled back in on campus, where everything has changed––including him. This time around, Dolan’s winning. He’s received a grant from the State of Connecticut for his work, and he’s bringing speakers to campus, spreading awareness of the problem. During his time away, the dragon that nearly killed him might have grown stronger and hungrier. But there’s one thing Sacred Heart has now that it never had before.

Its very own dragon slayer.