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Grant High School’s student magazine published a story Monday morning about a man in his late 20s who for years has run an Instagram account and associated website dedicated to photographing and highlighting female high school sports teams—and the female athletes who compete—in Oregon.
Grant Magazine writes that Eric Watkins, who for years ran the popular Instagram account @eliteoregongirls, had a pattern of inappropriate conduct with female athletes, some as young as 13, whose performance he documented and photographed.
Screenshots of direct message conversations between Watkins and five separate female student athletes on Instagram obtained by Grant Magazine authors Claire Coffey, Ava Siano and Veronica Bianco show that Watkins would often send flirty messages to female athletes, decorated with heart and winking emojis. Watkins initiated the conversations.
Watkins’ conduct was such that the Salem Keizer School District banned him in May from all school properties and events, Grant Magazine found. The district cited, according to the article, “inappropriate messages between Watkins and student athletes in the district, some as young as 13 years old.”
Prior to 2020, Watkins covered both girls’ and boys’ youth sports. But in 2020, according to Grant Magazine, he switched to coverage of female athletes only, claiming to want to “inspire an entire state of girls.”
After Grant Magazine reached out to Watkins about the story, he took to social media to announce that he would abandon the Instagram account entirely.
The article points out the structural imbalance present in Watkins’ coverage of female youth sports: “Clear power dynamics are at play: Watkins decides who he covers and when, gives out awards and highlights individual athletes,” the authors wrote. “Because of his large following, his presence at games is desirable, giving female athletes all the more incentive to engage with him.”
On Nov. 22 and Dec. 5, according to the article, Watkins made separate posts on the Instagram account that he was stepping down from running it, saying he felt “undervalued” and that it had left him feeling “tired, broken and lost.”
Both announcements came after Grant Magazine had reached out to him regarding its findings, the authors said. (One of the reporters, Veronica Bianco, is a frequent WW contributor.)
Watkins tells WW he disagrees with the “characterization of the information that [Grant Magazine] found.”
“Nothing has tarnished my legacy or work with Elite Oregon Girls, and I never had any expectation of personal benefit for my work,” Watkins says. “All of these things boil down to individual interpretation, and there’s nothing that I regret, it was done out of heart and passion for the work that I accomplished.”
