Are teams enriched or are good athletes in the United States losing opportunities?
He’s tall. He’s fast. He’s so skinny he must scare fat away.
David Kimani has been terrorizing the tracks and cross-country courses of the National Collegiate Athletic Association for two years now. As a freshman
ALSO SEE: A Foreign Flavor in College Sports |
at the University of South Alabama, he won the N.C.A.A.'s Division I cross-country championship, then added the indoor 3,000-meter and 5,000-meter titles for good measure. His coach was hired away last year to be an assistant at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, and Mr. Kimani transferred there. He continued to roll for the Tide this season, defending his two indoor national championships on the gleaming new track here at the University of Arkansas.
But Mr. Kimani is not exactly your typical sweet-home Alabama man. The wispy runner is Kenyan, one of legions of foreign athletes who have come to dominate many of the N.C.A.A.'s nonrevenue sports.
Men and women come from all over the world because the United States is the only country that combines university education with sports development. They are also drawn here because college coaches want to win conference and national titles, and there aren’t enough blue-chip Americans to go around.
The practice of recruiting foreigners raises both ethical and practical questions for Olympic-style sports at American colleges, which together have far higher rates of foreign athletes on scholarship than foreign students enrolled.
Should a hand-picked team of foreign mercenaries be a “national” champion? Does the proliferation of international athletes deprive Americans of a chance to get an education on scholarship, or to develop into Olympic-caliber athletes?
Most coaches don’t see a problem with the practice, but a few vocally oppose it. The fact of the matter is that in most nonrevenue sports, the majority of blue-chip Americans flock to a handful of institutions. To be competitive, coaches at most of the other 300-plus colleges in Division I must recruit with passports in hand.
At last month’s World Cross-Country Championships, in Belgium, “I guarantee that there [were] a minimum of 40 N.C.A.A. coaches there trying to recruit,” says Lance Harter, the women’s track coach at Arkansas.
“Some people just make fools of themselves chasing these kids,” says Mr. Harter, who recruits foreign athletes in moderation. “It’s just ugly.”
Mr. Kimani is a member of the Kikuyu tribe from Nairobi. The Kikuyu aren’t known for their distance-running prowess, unlike the Kalenjin in the Kenyan highlands, but Mr. Kimani knows an opportunity when he sees one.
“I actually played soccer all through school, before I started to run,” he says, stretching his long legs out and trying to get comfortable after running away from the field in the 5,000-meter championship. “But my coach said running was a great way to get a scholarship.”
So after he won a provincial cross-country title in high school, he met Joseph Walker Sr., the coach at the University of Mississippi, who steered him to Joe Walker Jr., then the coach at South Alabama. When the younger Mr. Walker left for Tuscaloosa, Mr. Kimani went with him.
Now, only a semester later, Tuscaloosa has a surprisingly large population of Kenyan expatriates, who have turned the Crimson Tide into a surprising N.C.A.A. powerhouse in cross-country.
“My philosophy is that I just want athletes that are ready to compete at a high level,” says Harvey Glance, Alabama’s head coach. In the intensely competitive Southeastern Conference, “you can no longer wait to develop athletes.”
He continues: “If you’re not coming in at a certain level, you’re wasting a scholarship for two years. Now, we will recruit from the [junior colleges], and we pick up some nice American kids this way.”
Most track coaches in the N.C.A.A. -- especially men’s coaches -- would echo Mr. Glance’s sentiments. Since 1993, the N.C.A.A. has allowed track coaches only 12.6 scholarships for a given year for men. And because many coaches of men’s teams have had to cut the number of athletes they allow to “walk on” to their teams without a scholarship, to meet their institutions’ gender-equity goals, coaches must get the most bang for the buck out of their athletes.
“The cutbacks in scholarships forced everyone to get serious,” says John McDonnell, an Irish native who has been the men’s coach at Arkansas since 1972. “There have been more and more foreign runners, and they’ve set the standard for American athletes.”
Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge won the Division I men’s indoor-track competition here with quartermilers from Grenada, Jamaica, New Mexico, and Texas, as well as two Louisiana long-jumpers. L.S.U. finished a point ahead of Texas Christian University, which scored all of its points with six Texans, two Jamaicans, a Kenyan, and a sprinter from St. Kitts. Most of the Horned Frogs, foreign and domestic, also are products of American junior colleges.
Across the country, squads in tennis, swimming, and a few other sports have rosters that are just as diverse. T.C.U.'s men’s tennis team is ranked second in the country, as of March 21, with a Brazilian, a Mexican, a Czech, and two Spaniards on the roster, along with six Americans.
The coaches of these teams don’t see a problem, of course. They rave about their foreign athletes, saying they’re good role models for Americans.
“It provides [American students] with a better view of the big picture,” says Mr. Harter, the Arkansas coach. Foreign athletes “are usually much more focused and direct about both academics and athletics, and they’re phenomenal role models.”
Mr. Harter and other coaches who recruit foreign athletes make many of the same arguments that universities do about recruiting international students: Having them introduces Americans to different cultures, teaches them about getting along in society, and exposes them to the global competition they’ll undoubtedly face in the working world.
That point is a little disingenuous. In 1998-99, the latest year for which figures are available, 2.6 percent of undergraduates at Division I institutions were “nonresident aliens,” according to statistics published by the N.C.A.A. with last fall’s graduation-rates report. At the same time, 6.5 percent of scholarship athletes fell into that category, as did 8.8 percent of track athletes. And 14.7 percent of male scholarship athletes in sports other than football, basketball, baseball, and track were listed as nonresident aliens.
Since relatively few foreign athletes play sports like soccer, rowing, and lacrosse, that means that a much higher proportion of swimmers, tennis players, and other athletes came from other countries. And because some individual colleges list foreign athletes by their race, rather than as nonresident aliens, even more athletes may hail from abroad.
That means fewer American athletes get the opportunity to develop into international-caliber competitors, says Mark Wetmore, the track coach at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
“International student-athletes displace domestic student-athletes whose parents have paid taxes to the United States for many, many years and who might later develop into Olympians for the United States,” says Mr. Wetmore, whose Buffaloes placed second to Arkansas last fall in the men’s cross-country championships. In the women’s 100-meter dash at last fall’s Olympics, in Australia, “almost all of the final eight” attended American universities, he says. “And all but the one or two Americans displaced American athletes to go to those universities.”
Daniel Lincoln disagrees. A junior at Arkansas who placed seventh behind Mr. Kimani in the 3,000-meter run at the indoor-track meet here, he says he doesn’t resent foreign athletes, even though he never had a dream of getting an athletics scholarship. A good but not superlative runner in high school -- his best mile was run in 4 minutes 16 seconds for Fayetteville High -- Mr. Lincoln went to Arkansas on an academic scholarship and walked on to the track team.
After three years of practicing every day with Australians, Canadians, and Kenyans, he has become one of the better Americans in the middle distances.
“It’s really a blessing that we have these foreign athletes,” Mr. Lincoln says. Americans “have other ways of getting into school” besides sports scholarships, including the opportunity to apply for federal financial aid.
But administrators and coaches at Arkansas are very careful about how many foreign athletes they enroll.
“Our first responsibility is to our state,” says Beverly R. Lewis, a former track coach who now directs women’s athletics at Arkansas. “We have a responsibility to U.S. athletes, but it’s also important to be competitive, and if the quality of athletes is not available, I would not limit our coaches in terms of who they can recruit.”
Mr. Harter, who reports to Ms. Lewis, and Mr. McDonnell both have built top teams with a mix of Americans and international athletes. But few other programs are as successful at mixing domestic and foreign stars.
Colorado and Stanford University have become bastions of American athletes. Mr. Wetmore and his Cardinal counterpart, Vin Lananna, have built powerhouse teams with only domestic recruits. “I have to find my own niche” in the world of recruiting, says Mr. Lananna. At Stanford, “our niche is a talented group of American kids.
“It’s simply different with international athletes. In all seriousness, it’s difficult to get into Stanford,” Mr. Lananna says. Almost all international athletes need full scholarships, “and we just don’t do that. The U.S. kids can usually afford to pay something, and my philosophy is that if I can get U.S. kids who can do similar things, I want to get them.”
However, most other coaches have come around to a more cynical philosophy, Mr. Harter says.
“When I first got this job, the best line I heard was from John McDonnell,” he says. “He said, ‘My peers always felt strongly about international athletes -- until they got a phone number.’ ”
A FOREIGN FLAVOR IN COLLEGE SPORTS
The National Collegiate Athletic Association’s latest graduation-rate report, for the 1998-99 academic year, shows that foreign athletes are more heavily represented among scholarship athletes -- particularly in nonrevenue sports -- than they are among students generally.
| All undergraduates | Nonresident aliens | Proportion of all undergraduates |
All students | 2,910,679 | 76,930 | 2.6% |
Male athletes | 40,329 | 2,509 | 6.2% |
Basketball players | 3,712 | 237 | 6.4% |
Baseball players | 5,950 | 91 | 1.5% |
Cross-country/track and field athletes | 4,498 | 395 | 8.8% |
Football players | 14,592 | 101 | 0.7% |
Athletes in other sports | 11,520 | 1,692 | 14.7% |
Female athletes | 29,239 | 1,990 | 6.8% |
Basketball players | 3,938 | 190 | 4.8% |
Cross-country/track and field athletes | 5,438 | 390 | 7.2% |
Athletes in other sports | 19,690 | 1,397 | 7.1% |
SOURCE: N.C.A.A. |
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