By Alex Sheedy
Editor’s note: Alex Sheedy is a senior mass communication and journalism senior from Australia who played for the Fresno State women’s basketball team.
The influx of international student-athletes into the United States college system has led to a push-pull relationship for coaches, administration and athletes, as they find the balance between local recruiting and international recruiting.
Fresno State currently plays host to 28 international student-athletes: eight men and 20 women.
With the introduction of Title IX, the school suffered in the number of male athlete participants, with football accounting for the majority of full-ride scholarships available to male athletes. The popular male wrestling program was cut to meet the new standards.
Currently, tennis and cross-country are the only sports that have male international student-athletes. Meanwhile, international female athletes are competing in six sports, all on full scholarships.
“In a sport like track and field where you have less scholarships than you have events, you have to have people, if they’re on a full scholarship, be major contributors,” said cross-country coach Sean McManus.
The cost of international athletes is the price of a full scholarship to the school, paid for through donations and boosters. Full scholarships for international students can run up to $27,000, including out-of-state tuition fees and the cost of books and classes.
At Fresno State, the Bulldog Foundation covers athletic scholarships, with each program allowed a specific number of scholarships based on funding.
Coaches of each program have the ability to divvy up available funds into scholarships of varying amounts, tailored to the needs of each individual athlete, including full scholarships, 75-, 50- and 25-percent scholarships that cover different expenses including stipends, tuition and the cost of books.
Time differences, language barriers and strict NCAA recruiting policy are factors in how much time coaches have to communicate with potential team members.
Fresno State women’s golf head coach Emily Milberger, women’s tennis head coach Ryan Stotland and McManus said the recruiting of international players is best done by communicating with trusted friends and coaches overseas and by using email and the inexpensive webchat software, Skype.
“The visiting to campuses is a bit hit-and-miss,” Milberger said. Student-athletes have up to five official visits to any campus, plus a number of unofficial visits. Making the trek to visit campus can be difficult for an international prospect, Millberger said, considering the time and expenses involved. Official visitors are only allowed to spend 48 hours at the school.
“They’re tending to do it all a little more sight-unseen, so there’s good and bad to that,” Milberger said.
“It just depends on who you know in what country,” Stotland said.
The biggest influence, Milberger, Stotland and McManus agree, is word of mouth.
Steve Robertello, interim athletics director, said that there is no limit to the number of international student-athletes who can be recruited and brought into the school.
“For the majority of our sports, we do try to look at predominantly California, but we really don’t limit it in terms of ‘you can only have so many international students,’” Robertello said. “We want our coaches to find the best student-athletes they can find for the university.”
The Fresno State women’s basketball team, which has been host to a number of international players, has hosted over 10 players from Australia since 2002. The team traveled “Down Under” in a tour of East Coast cities in August, and the men’s basketball team will be traveling to Italy in 2015 for a similar experience.
“We don’t put extra dollars into the recruiting budget,” Robertello said. “If they can make it work within their recruiting budget, then absolutely. Otherwise, it’s got to be where they’re going to go visit a student-athlete or a particular event they know that student-athlete is playing. So, it’s targeted.”
Due to the cost of having an international student-athlete, the coaches tend only to recruit players who can compete at a high level and bring success to the program, Stotland said.
“I’m looking for players that really want to see where they can take off and where they can get to,” Stotland said. “I want somebody that’s going to continue to improve.”
Milberger has been at Fresno State for the last two years. Her golf team has three international players: Guðrún Brá Björgvinsdóttir, a sophomore from Iceland, and freshmen Mimi Ho from Hong Kong and Samantha Spencer from Canada.
Golf is a sport played on an international stage, Milberger said, and for the program to be successful, a balance of national and international student-athletes is required.
“Tennis is an international sport, so a lot of the time, tennis in America isn’t the most popular choice of sports out here at the moment,” Stotland said. “There’s a lot of great players out there in the world, and to compete with the best, a lot of the teams out there are all international.”
Robertello said that from the standpoint of the administration, the international athlete brings many benefits to the school and individual sporting programs, by diversifying the student-athlete population and bringing great talent to each team.
Academically, Robertello said, he has never had a problem with international students.
One of the major criticisms the international student-athlete community faces is that the students are taking scholarships away from domestic athletes, Robertello said.
“The question has come up every once in a while,” Robertello said. “We had it last year with tennis. People look at it and go, ‘How come you don’t have any Americans on your roster?’ or ‘Why aren’t you recruiting in the United States for tennis? Or in California?’ and all that kind of stuff. Our response is probably not politically correct, but pretty simple: Yeah, we could recruit all American students, (but) we wouldn’t be very good in tennis.”
Robertello said that people would rather have success in sports than not, and that that’s what the administration attempts to focus on.
“So you know, we always try to focus on recruiting the best student-athlete and recruiting out of state and all those sorts of things. Sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesn’t.”