Walk into a college campus in Nebraska today and the odds are reasonable that someone in the building has a sports betting account on their phone. Mike Sciandra says this is not accidental. It is what happens when gambling marketing arrives through the same apps that carry everything else, starting in adolescence, before most users have worked out the difference between a pastime and a compulsion.
Sciandra leads the Nebraska Council on Problem Gambling, a nonprofit based in Lincoln that holds a deliberately neutral position on legal gambling itself. The organization’s work is focused on awareness, harm prevention and connecting people who need help to the services the state provides. But over the past year, he has put a specific group at the center of that work: students and young people who came of age in an environment where gambling sponsorships appear in game broadcasts and betting apps sit alongside social media on the same screen. Research from the Nebraska Commission on Problem Gambling found that over half of the individuals the commission assisted had first started gambling before age 21.
“They’re the first generation to have gambling truly normalized within the culture,” Sciandra said in a March 2026 interview with Omaha television station KMTV. He also noted that illegal sports books remain active at high schools and colleges across the state, providing access well ahead of any legal threshold.
For the 2026-27 school year, NeCPG introduced the “Education Has the Best Odds” campaign, which concentrates its programming directly inside schools and on campuses. The council holds partnerships with nearly 20 college institutions, Sciandra has said, among them the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Creighton University, along with secondary schools and youth organizations across the state. The campaign’s activities include classroom presentations, information and screening tables at campus events, training for resident advisors and counseling staff, and referral support for campus athletic departments. All services are provided free of charge to participating Nebraska institutions.
The classroom presentations carry a component no credential can fully supply. Sciandra has spoken openly about his own history with gambling: he started before age 20, and he has said publicly that he has been bet-free since December 14, 2020. When a presentation includes the perspective of someone who has moved through the disorder firsthand, that person is often him. He has described the early warning pattern in plain terms: the point at which gambling stops being a hobby and begins to claim a person’s time and attention as a primary concern.
Before NeCPG, Sciandra spent years in sales and marketing, then shifted into behavioral health outreach. From November 2021 onward, he served as Education and Outreach Coordinator at Choices Treatment Center, an outpatient addiction facility operating at multiple Nebraska locations. At the time of his appointment, NeCPG described his academic background as including a Master of Arts in Management from Doane College and a Bachelor of Science in Marketing Management from Bellevue University. He also holds, the organization reported, a Disordered Gambling Counselor Certificate from Bellevue University, a Certified Peer Support Specialist credential from Southeast Community College, and designations as an International Gambling Recovery Specialist and Board Approved Recovery Advisor through the International Problem Gambling and Gaming Certification Organization. The NeCPG board named him executive director in April 2025, succeeding Aletha “Buffy” Cornish, who had held the interim position since 2022.
Founded in 1992 as the Nebraska Council on Compulsive Gambling, NeCPG is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and the sole Nebraska affiliate of the National Council on Problem Gambling, a national body that similarly takes no stance on legalized gambling. The council’s priorities cover education, prevention, advocacy and connecting Nebraskans to recovery resources. Central among those is the Nebraska Gamblers Assistance Program, a state initiative funded by gaming tax revenue that provides professional counseling at no cost to Nebraskans and their families through certified disordered gambling counselors. The program’s helpline runs around the clock at 1-833-BET-OVER (1-833-238-6837). Information on these and other support options is available at [necpg.org/links].
Sciandra has also taken NeCPG’s work into legislative settings. In January 2026, he publicly opposed LB-1072, a bill introduced in the Nebraska Legislature on behalf of Governor Jim Pillen that would have dissolved the Nebraska Commission on Problem Gambling and transferred its functions to the state Division of Behavioral Health. The proposal also called for cutting funding for problem gambling assistance from $1.5 million to $900,000. In statements reported by Lincoln radio station KLIN and other Nebraska news organizations, Sciandra argued the change would put the treatment capacity the commission had built at serious risk, at precisely the moment demand for those services was continuing to grow.
