Depending on which sport a high school athlete plays, it can be them against the world for a college athletic scholarship.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association notes that there are 17,000 students athletes from other countries among the roughly 480,000 students that take part in NCAA sports. While that’s only about 3.5% of all NCAA student athletes, those numbers have a disproportionate effect on certain sports.
Take tennis, for example. Over 32% of men and 30% of women on college tennis teams come from other countries, and many of them are on scholarships. Plus, for the 191,000 tennis players on high school teams in the U.S. in 2013-2014, there were only 2,417 available college scholarships.
Why are there so many foreign-born tennis players with U.S. scholarships?
Michael Starke, who coached the Division I men’s tennis team at Binghamton University from 1987 to 2006, says the majority of the top 100 ranked players in Division I have been international for over 20 years. He says it’s a global sport, and that almost every country has a publicly funded national tennis federation.
“Tennis is a means to financial success and a way out in many countries,” he says, adding that there are more distractions in the U.S. with so many choices of sports to play.
Also, “Foreign players, by and large, have a stronger work ethic, and they have a respect for teachers and educators ingrained in their culture.”
Patrick O’Rourke, a certified public accountant in Washington, D.C., set up ScholarshipStats.com to help parents and students determine the odds of securing a college scholarship for playing sports. However, comparing the number of high school athletes in each sport to the number of available college scholarships in those sports doesn’t always tell the whole story.
“Many foreign student athletes compete on U.S. college varsity teams and may not be reflected as U.S. high school participants,” O’Rourke says in the fine print beneath his data. “This factor may result in computed participation percentages for many sports that are artificially high.”
For example, by O’Rourke’s numbers, high-school boys who play ice hockey have a 12.3% chance of playing in college and a 36:1 shot of getting a scholarship. That looks a lot better than the 6.1% chance of playing college basketball or the 57:1 chance of scoring a basketball scholarship, but there’s a big problem with those figures — as there is with the 23.5% of high-school girls who play college hockey and their 15:1 odds of getting an athletic scholarship.
First, 21.6% of men’s players and 26.9% of women’s players in all of college hockey came from other countries. Of the 1,645 players on men’s college hockey teams last year, 462 were Canadian and 62 were European. On the women’s side, 41% of all 825 Division I players came from Canada or Europe. Also, those totals only included players who played for U.S. high school hockey teams, not club hockey teams. In the NCAA’s Division I alone, only 4.9% of men and 38.4% of women came to college from high school or prep school teams. A whopping 90.7% of men and 58.3% of women played for club teams first, which skews the sample.
And while the NCAA average for foreign student athletes is just 4.5% of the total for men and 5.6% for women, those numbers could soon increase. The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania pointed out last year that there are now organizations in other countries to help student athletes get placed at U.S. schools. For example, Gonzalo Corrales, founder of AGM Sports in Zaragoza, Spain — himself a scholarship athlete in the U.S. in 1995 — notes that “sixty-five percent of our girls have gone to the U.S., with all four years of their college paid for.”
Those international athletes are willing to pay firms like AGM to help place them with U.S. schools, while U.S. Division I programs have been more likely to send recruiters to international tournaments in recent years. And recruiting is getting even easier as conferencing apps like FaceTime and Skype make it easier and less costly for coaches and recruiters to keep track of and speak directly to international players.
In a conversation with the University of Southern California’s Daily Trojan student newspaper four years ago, Magdi El Shahawy, director of USC Student-Athlete Academic Services, noted that any level of discomfort or degree of adjustment that comes with a move to the U.S. is just about always offset by the benefits of an athletic scholarship.
“I think they come to an American institution to get an education and further develop their skills in their sport,” El Shahawy said. “They get a chance to get a free education, where sports don’t provide that for them in their own country.”
And foreign student athletes have a large presence in sports that have some of the lowest representation among the nation’s colleges. While tennis is offered at 1,194 schools, just 164 have hockey programs. For skiing, where roughly 18% of both male and female student athletes are from another country, there are just 41 schools to choose from. Squash, with 15% foreign athletes of all genders, is a fixture at just 35 schools — and just five offer it as a scholarship sport (though one is the Naval Academy).
Even in soccer, where roughly 12% of male players hail from other countries — compared with a below-average 4.9% of females — it’s important to remember that players from overseas may have an upper hand simply by being more familiar with a game that’s not as popular in the U.S. Instead of sulking about it, college coaches advise U.S. players to learn something from their foreign counterparts. Bill Kelly, head soccer coach at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., notes that it’s tough to counter development systems overseas, but U.S. players should play for the best club they can for the best coaches possible if they want to be competitive for scholarships.
“Another thing I always encourage is for young players to watch top level soccer on TV to learn more about the game,” he told ScholarshipStats.com. “It’s amazing how much one can learn by listening to the game commentators! Educate yourself, know your stuff, and become a true student of the game.”
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