This was brought on by more than a few comments on the Seneca threads, and the NAIA threads, as well as other comments I have read along the way regarding the monster known as the foriegn athlete. Are they monsters or just talented fellow human beings trying to develop and get an education just like you or I.
I am on this site quite often, and one thing that really stands out is all the hatred toward foriegners who compete in our college system, and the schools who recruit them. It is as if these individuals have nothing to offer the sport, and are only here to make life hard for our developing american runners and to take money away. I personally think they help to raise the quality of the fields, and that is a very important thing to have when trying to get our young guys to eventually step up. I was thinking, if there was a rule that banned non-americans from taking an athletic scholarship, at what level would we find our national meets? Those holes in rosters would have to be filled by someone, and who would that someone be? Because this is a distance site, and because my favorite H.S. distance is the 3000m/3200m, I will use that as an example. As it stands now, all the good runners get scooped up(sub 9:20), and that is how it should be, but we would have holes, and that would mean an elevation of the slower guys up to the next level. So a 9:30-9:40 guy who normally wouldn't be sought after by DI might just be a guy who gets a little money. This takes him out of the DII level, and so DII goes after DIII guys and so forth. When I was competing, we had Jonah Koech and Jon Brown as the two studs in the system. These guys definitely made the young americans at the time have to step it up a notch. Koech was a 13:10 guy and Brown is a 27:30/2:10ish guy now. There were many others as well, but I think they helped Todd Williams and Bob Kennedy develop by showing them what is out there awaiting them when they finished school. They either knew they could get it done, or they didn't, or they went home and trained some more. Mt point is that, yes, those foriegners take money away from someone down the scholarship line(9:40-10:00 guy), but they really do help at the top, by putting our young americans who will someday be our future Olympians in a sink or swim situation.
Thanks for reading!