Easy fix for the foreign recruiting issue in the NCAA

Tell me you know nothing about international students without saying you know nothing about international students.

The NCAA was formed because college football was unregulated and players were dying on the field. College sports and the college and university industry as a whole have never been for just Americans. I do not know where you get your info but you could not be more wrong. US colleges exist to educate people........regardless of their birth country.

As for international students, the hoops that they have to jump through to get admitted to US schools is much harder then domestic kids. They have to have proof of income, show bank statements, pass english proficiency test, and have their transcripts reviewed by independent firms that also meet the requirements of the NCAA, NAIA, or whatever association they compete in. To top it off they can go through this whole process and the person that they have to interview with at the US embassy could be in a bad mood and deny them the visa and then tell them the next available appointment is in 3 months.

Your argument is naive at best and to be honest completely unrealistic. Most large research Universities actively recruit the best and brightest internationals in not just sports but academics as well. Should those kids not be allowed? This whole argument is trying to find a solution for a problem that doesn't exist.

Thank you. This ^. Internationals are the least of TF and XC'x problems. D1 olympic sports will not exist in their current form in two years. Write it down.

I am just curious based on your response. Why do you think that you are owed a D1 spot? If there is one D1 school in your state and they dont want you then you are not D1 level for your state. Sorry but those are facts. If you want to go D1 so bad leave the state. No one is forcing you to stay. If the available scholarships are not good enough for you to afford then when are you going to wake up and realize you are not D1. If D1's dont want you or dont give you good deals then they are not sold that you are actually D1 material.

Plus you guys are missing the whole point. Internationals are not really the problem for high school kids anymore. The transfer portal is. Why would I recruit an unproven 18 year old that will need at least a year or two to develop when I can get a garaunteed All-American transfer or an international running 13:50 as a freshman. Thats stupid to do otherwise if you want to win. If you have a championship caliber team they better run well now because you will lose at least 1/3 of them to transfer the next year. D1 coaches dont have time to wait on you. D1 is no longer for freshman. Most high school seniors have no business at that level to be honest. Go D2, D3, NAIA and then transfer. That is the norm now.

That's not actually true. If you read the manual you'll see that, yes, your clock starts when you enroll full time in a college program. So UK athletes who go to uni and compete at BUCS get docked seasons. If you never enroll in an institution then your clock doesn't start. The way they count your remaining eligibility is by looking at competitions you competed in before you enroll - and calculate how many "seasons" it equals. It's literally how Kipchoge is listed as Freshman at Texas Tech. Don't ask me how it's possible he's not competed enough to not be freshman eligible.

My suggestion of: you have a year to enroll at an institution or your clock starts with the two current exceptions: religious mission or military service. It's not that hard a solution.

re the hoops international students jump through, duh, you want to make sure their grades and scores are real, that they are college ready like they went to a domestic HS, that they read/write/speak the language of instruction, that they aren't criminals, and that they can get a visa in the country.

as i explained, i had foreign teammates. they are friends. they also paid to attend here.

i also studied in europe and paid through the nose for it compared to their own students.

my issue is you give out whole or partial scholarships, at some places funded with tax dollars, to those students ahead of domestic students. that's funding and who gets that reward. should americans be paying for scholarships that go to foreign kids. that's separate from admissions, being allowed to compete, background checks, credentialing.

again repeating myself, look up any school in the UK or other european country. there is usually (a) a UK price, (b) a EU price, and (c) an international price. 3 guesses which one US pays? and presumably that's after jumping through all the same bureaucratic hurdles you mentioned.

i mean, someone naively said, our education is for everyone. fine. pay full price. that's still nicer than they do to us. you want what they do to us, ok, sticker price for you is triple.

the guy who discussed the D1 clock as though it's a solution misses that it doesn't start til you show up and start full time someplace. so if you show up 22 you can run 4 years out of 5 from then. what you're really meaning is you want the clock to go ahead and get triggered when their HS class would have entered, or something like that.

select teammate of mine dropped out of his D3, dropped back in 5 years later at our encouragement. under D3, he could play. now mid-20s.

but my experience, he was a shell of himself. he went from the leading scorer to a beer bellied sub. we had a couple like that on our D3 soccer team. they were bench guys. most athletes who drop out or don't start school at 18, enter the workforce, that's more like what happens. beer belly and they lose a step. and the longer they are out the harder it is to get it back. just like after those of us who finished, and eventually stopped serious training, encounter.

BYU has a massive running team and plays the odds of some of their missionary kids being able to come back from couch potato-dom. and they have unusual cultural values and societal influence that encourage cleaner living.

no, i think what you're really thinking about is some 25 year old kenyan kid competing on scholarship. years in serious training environments. almost baby pro. i pointed to one way to deal with that. quit waving state-tax-funded scholarships. i mean how many times do you see someone on here saying i run some ok time, say, 150 for the 8, "where do i sign up." ie, who will give me a free ride/. you and i both know that's about i'd like to go to school (a) here (b) for free. i have no problem with (a) here. i have an issue with (b) free.

you yank the incentives system and that gets you foreign athletes paying for the education rather than the reverse. that then fixes your numbers issue as it's no longer padded by (b) free. without a ban on all participation. basically the D3 model, with scholarships, but only for those with status who pay taxes and fund the system that rewards this.

That seems like a solution looking for a problem. It also likely could violate civil rights laws about not discriminating based on national origin.

Athletic scholarships (and tons of other academic ones) are not funded with taxpayer dollars.

first off, i was offered D1 walkons. so jump in a lake on "not good enough." my decision ended up being about a whole set of factors including whether i wanted to walk on or be core someplace, which included lower division scholarship offers, D1 walkons, and D3 starting roles.

but you're not getting if you are in a state in the south or interior west, and there are few or no D1s in your state, and maybe 10 kids in state on the roster. that's like 2-3 recruits a season. then the 10 foreign kids are putting a serious dent in your chances.

vs. your state has 10-20 programs, which other states do. times whatever percentage of 25-30 kids are domestic.

and the part you're missing is it was not easy to entice some coach from 5 states away to come watch me play. i managed a handful. i got some walkon offers. but to me the far easier solution is a mix of (a) more soccer programs and (b) fewer imported roster kids.

beyond that, you can implicitly talk smack about me all you want. i was my D3's co-MVP. i explained the success levels of other people i knew. kids who went out of state and were all americans in D1, who were like top 20 national recruits on the youth national team. kids who went on to be D3 all americans in the local D3 conference in artificial abundance. including one who was a long term pro.

does that sound like they were weeded out? like they didn't deserve it?

what i am trying to explain is that you get born in a part of the country you can't control, with parents who maybe can't afford to move, and that a mix of limited programs and foreign recruits can ice out D1 and/or pro level talent. in some other part of the country, say, the northeast, different story. but my and my colleagues' problem is sufficiently big it should be factored into the calculus of foreign student involvement.

you don't know what you're talking about.

you're confusing power 5 schools with strong revenue sport teams with everyone else, vs. nonrevenue teams, and those in lower divisions or less rich conferences.

you're also neglecting that part of their scholarship may include athletics fees they don't have to pay.

that and it's tax exempt, to date, which is going to get more interesting if this pushes towards a truer income model.

Well that's certainly the dumbest take I've heard today. You think every foreigner can just drop everything and go to America for a highschool education. That's just a waste of time and money that could be saved by waiting and going to a college/university where a degree would hold some actual weight

what i'd compare it to is a food desert. in grad school i briefly lived in a poor, small city that had literally no grocery stores.

if i say, i was already poor and had trouble accessing food, you can start with some generic welfare type rant, making assumptions about me, or you can perhaps use your brain and deduct the real structural problems that affected anyone going to school there, particularly those without cars.

i ended up walking a couple miles to the next town every week with my friend/roommate, without a car.

i get conservatives like to think of everything as punishing the lazy but that is not actually how the world operates.

to lob a related thought in the mix, title IX. the reason there are few soccer teams in the interior west and south is state schools tend to set things up where everyone has a women's team but next to none have a men's team. which means different levels of women's vs. men's athletes can get D1 where i grew up. there may be 10, 20 women's programs, 0-5 men's.

the somewhat similar aspect on TF/XC is title IX roster limits. if you let more people per team then you get to the same place as international limits or adding programs.

at which point, like your colleague is saying, will the lawsuit settlement have the opposite effect. capped roster sizes. increased team cost. potential team cuts.

on reggie bush, how is his parents getting a rent free home like NIL now?

or are we going to say you can literally buy the family off and not just compensate directly for labor or image rights.

So all the Kenyan ekiden runners on Japanese college teams are paying their full tuition?

That's a lot of money for an average Kenyan family. /s

I’m not on with that “religious mission” stuff either. If you choose to spend your prime physical years serving people on behalf of your church, more power to you! But that doesn’t give you the privilege to then come back and compete against guys younger than you because you were busy building wells while they were training.

That’s not true. You misunderstand how schooling coming from Kenya to America works, but I don’t blame you, you’ve probably never been part of the system or have any idea how it works. A lot of churches in Kenya connect with American organizations to send their high school age kids here for free. All one has to do is want it, work in their elementary school to be the best of their classmates academically, and they will earn sponsorship to come to the US for free and be schooled for free while staying with a host family. The other option, the scummy one that I’m looking to get rid of, is you sit around and train till you’re 27 and a Kenyan talent agency hired by the US college system promises you great wealth off of NIL as long as you go run for them. Then they rob you of your money under the table, pressure you to take all sorts of gray area stuff, and make your experience a nightmare every summer you come home from your college. It’s an actual nightmare for athletes and bad for the sport. That’s why we need to have a safe healthy high school pipeline for these international students if they truly want to compete.

Title IX is a different issue. I’ll have to make a different, equally controversial thread dissecting that. I doubt I can be the one to save college sports by bringing up relevant issues like this on an Internet forum, and the NCAA will likely be reduced to a club sports opportunity thanks to all these issues within years, but it doesn’t hurt to try. The truth is I love the sport and I’ll compete in it for the rest of my life whether I’m being paid or not. I’m not an entitled college student jealous of foreigners who clearly have worked harder than me and deserve to be signed to a pro contract, something I’ll probably never have and that’s OK. But I don’t want to sport being ruined by these corrupt figures like Kenyan talent agencies that bully their athletes, steal their money, pressure them to take things, and abuse an existing system in a foreign country. The sport I love shouldn’t be ruined by some dumb policies.

"When you disagree with someone, don't personally attack them"...proceeds to personally attack the guy that he disagrees with. Classic.

If me asking those questions are an "attack", then I'm guessing you're upset for the same reason. Not once did I name call, but challenged OP on why he felt the need to write a piece targeted at "25 year old random Kenyans stealing American kid's scholarships". Hefty accusations towards people who 100% offered this by the coaches. Be mad at the system, sure. But don't go after these guys who were offered a life changing opportunity and said yes.