Former Iowa State tight end DeShawn Hanika wants college athletes to learn from his sports betting mistakes

Former Iowa State tight end DeShawn Hanika was one of more than a dozen athletes from Iowa State and Iowa charged last year with improperly placing sports bets as part of the state’s investigation into sports wagering at the collegiate level.

Hanika, who missed the entire 2023 season and transferred to Kansas in December 2023, has partnered with a sports gambling integrity and compliance technology company to educate collegiate athletes on the pitfalls of disobeying betting rules.

Most of the athletes were accused of underage gambling and, in the case of Hanika, registering accounts on mobile sports betting apps under a different name. Others were accused of betting on games they played in.

Ahead of the 2024 season, Hanika is partnering with Integrity Compliance 360, a technology company specializing in sports wagering integrity and compliance. IC360 uses software to send an alert when a player or other team member attempts to wager using a sportsbook. The hope is that other collegiate athletes can learn from the mistakes Hanika made in sports wagering and prevent them from losing eligibility or facing charges that could land them in prison.

“If I can help one kid be like, ‘You know what? I haven’t been caught yet, but I’m not going to risk it,’ and stop, that’s good enough for me,” Hanika told Andscape.

Growing up in Topeka, Kansas, Hanika didn’t engage in sports wagering.

No one in his family bet on sports, and he only knew about it because of all the ads he would see plastered on the internet and television. He knew next to nothing about sports wagering. He didn’t even know it was mostly illegal in America before 2018. He was only vaguely aware of the former Cincinnati Reds manager Pete Rose, who was investigated by the MLB over claims that he bet on games he played and managed in. Hanika’s only connection to gambling was that his grandfather went to the casino regularly to play the slot machines.

“Gambling, to me, it was a Thursday night going to the casino, playing the penny slots and taking grandma out to the buffet steak dinner,” he said.

During the summer of 2022, Hanika placed his first bet on the DraftKings Sportsbook & Casino mobile app. He and his teammates were practically the only students still in Ames, Iowa, participating in summer football camp. Hanika was bored on campus, so he figured why not bet on the UFC pay-per-view airing that night. He remembers betting just $2 and chalked up the wager as something to make the fight more interesting.

While Hanika lost the initial bet, he doesn’t remember having an immediate desire to do it again.

“It didn’t have an effect [on me],” he said. “I didn’t have a feeling, didn’t have an itch for it.”

After placing bets on UFC over the next few months, the next sport he wagered on was college basketball during the NCAA men’s basketball tournament in March 2023.

Betting on college hoops didn’t feel nefarious, seeing as March Madness brackets are an American pastime. He had a bit of irrational confidence in his picks because of his background as a high school basketball player. But much like UFC, his wagering on college basketball was trivial. Hanika placed a 32-leg parlay on the first round of the tournament but only wagered 10 cents.

“I just bet every game in the first round, and I didn’t win it,” he said. “So I’m not trying to get rich.”

Hanika was of legal age when he started placing bets in the summer of 2022. Still, he used his mother’s account because, after telling her of his interest in wagering, she suggested he use one under her name so she could monitor his activity.

Kimberly Hanika never expressed concern about her son’s wagering, because he placed less than 300 bets in about nine months, which averages out to about one bet per day. According to an affidavit, the total amount Hanika wagered over that period was about $1,262, with an average bet of less than $5.

Nevertheless, on the morning of March 2, 2023, after Hanika finished a workout at the Cyclones team facility, a woman from the Story County prosecutor’s office approached him and asked to speak privately with him.

Hanika had no reason to believe it was about the bets he had made over the last almost year. He assumed it was about his landlord, who had been arrested the day before on an unrelated charge. Instead, the woman said that it was about him placing illegal bets under his mother’s account. That would eventually lead to charges of tampering with records, an aggravated misdemeanor.

After Hanika answered all the questions about his wagering history, the woman served him a search warrant and confiscated his phone. He went home and called his mother on his iPad before getting his phone back the next day.

For the next three to four months, Hanika had no contact with the prosecutor’s office until Aug. 10, 2023, when Hanika’s stepfather sent him a screenshot from a social media post announcing that Hanika had been charged. Aggravated misdemeanors in Iowa carry a maximum sentence of up to two years in prison and a fine ranging from $855 to $8,540.

“So, we found out on Twitter,” he said.

Throughout the ordeal — from being approached in the team facility to having his phone confiscated to charges being filed — Hanika experienced a range of emotions. He was scared and nervous, and stressed about the harm his family experienced as a result of his actions. His high school-age brother was bullied by his classmates over reports of Hanika possibly facing prison time.

“I think that was more hard on me, hearing about his embarrassment, my family’s, than it was for me,” he said.

Hanika takes full accountability for his actions. He doesn’t blame Iowa State or the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, which launched the sports wagering investigation. He understands he should’ve been more aware of mobile betting identification laws. He said that the rules and laws about what was and wasn’t permitted in sports betting were confusing.

The Cyclones program held meetings at the beginning of the 2022 season and informed players that they could not bet on their own sports or give out insider information about the team. Though he knew he wasn’t placing bets under his own name, he saw no harm in what he was doing.

“I figured I’m not betting on myself, I’m not betting on my team. I am not hurting nobody. I’m not getting in a car at 2 o’clock in the morning and driving home drunk and hitting anyone,” Hanika said. “I’m not going to hurt anyone sitting here doing this.”

Because the Story County prosecutor’s office did not indict Hanika within 45 days after he waived a preliminary trial on Aug. 10, the misdemeanor tampering charge was dismissed on Oct. 2, 2023.

After catching 17 passes for 244 yards and four touchdowns during his junior season in 2022, Hanika practiced with Iowa State throughout the fall but never played a down during the 2023 season.

After talking with his then-fiancée and now-wife, Kate, Hanika announced Dec. 11, 2023, that he’d be transferring back home to the University of Kansas to play his final season of college football during the 2024 season. However, a torn Achilles tendon in an April practice has jeopardized this season. Hanika has a medical redshirt that would allow him to play in 2025.

“I’m attacking every day right now like I’m trying to get back this year,” he said.

Around the time he tore his Achilles tendon, Hanika was approached by IC360 representatives about helping spread his message to college athletes who may be interested in sports wagering.

The company’s clients include the UFC, LIV Golf and NCAA conferences: the SEC, Big 12, AAC and Mountain West. The goal is to prevent problems with sports gambling compliance from reaching the level of a state prosecutor or the FBI.

“It ultimately is a three-way platform. The betting operations will monitor all the activity, a sports league or organization will essentially provide the database of the list of names and contact details of all of the prohibited bettors,” Mark Potter, co-managing director of education and training services for IC360, said.

“And as the tech solution we’ll monitor that and everything would feed into it from the operator, through the database, through us, and then it’s all encrypted and held on very safely.”

IC360 had been following what happened to Hanika and other athletes caught up in sports betting and were interested in partnering with him to educate other collegiate athletes on the pitfalls of violating betting guidelines. Hanika initially declined to participate.

“I was still in that mindset of, if I can run from it, if I can keep my head down, maybe it’ll all go away,” he said.

But his mother and his wife told Hanika that he couldn’t run from the incident forever, that it would follow him no matter what. They asked him how he wanted people to talk about it: only in negative terms or spin it into a positive.

Hanika said he let go of his pride and decided to use his story as a teachable moment.

“I had to swallow my pride a little bit, and that was a big step for me,” he said. “And just accepting that, yeah, I made a mistake, here’s what I did, let me help someone else so they don’t go through this.”

As a part of the IC360 partnership, which the company calls the Gambling Awareness and Sports Integrity Program, Hanika created video content about his experiences with sports wagering, the lessons he took from getting charged, and the risks college athletes face by gambling.

“I think [he] really wanted to showcase how he took responsibility for what he did but also to showcase to young athletes how easy it is to get into and make those mistakes and to prevent other people from doing the same thing that he did,” Potter said.

When I ask Hanika about his current stance on sports betting, he laughs and says he gets that question all the time. His gambling days are over.

“I can go the rest of my life without any stress of that ever again,” he said. “I could care less to ever see another commercial, have it ever on my phone, in my sight, place a bet on any sporting event. I could care less.”

When asked what he’d tell a college athlete interested in getting into sports betting, Hanika says he’s already been approached about it.

He joked that he’d tell the person to give them his phone right then and there because Hanika wouldn’t allow it. He then told me the approximate amount his mother and stepfather had to pay to fight his case last year.

“I’ve been like, you know, it’s not that big of a deal if your parents got $60,000 right now to drop on a lawyer,” Hanika said. “So, you let me know if that’s not that big of a deal.”