This clipped from James Haslam

Is The Foreign Student College Tennis Debate Really About Player Development?

Players recruited from outside The US dominate D1 college tennis . This might mean that American tennis is doing something wrong in developing the best players … Or it might mean that in the US, fewer families choose to see the pro tour as the ultimate goal of playing tennis to achieve a better life for their children. Instead they prioritize tennis participation as a pathway to greater health, wellness and career success. In the latter case , it might be concluded that they are doing many things right. No matter what the outlook is , the economic realities of this issue are significant. For those not convinced that the foreign student college tennis issue is primarily about who should be given the opportunity to be a “student” driven by economic allocation , here are some numbers that frame this issue :

There are about 2500 D1 Tennis student athletes in the US with about 2/3 of these athletes or 1675 being foreign students on F-1 or M-1 visas.

When the cost of conducting the program , tuition, books, housing, fees , travel , medical care are broken down and calculated, a conservative estimate is that each student each year receives about $200,000 in value, before NIL monies.

So the cost to the college system yearly we can estimate to be about $335 million dollars before NIL. This means that in aggregate , in D1 tennis alone , four year scholarships cost the system well over one billion dollars. We can further extrapolate by understanding that the median lifetime earnings of a college graduate over just a High School degree is 1.2 million dollars. So each year an astonishing future earnings of over 1 billion dollars are facilitated by the opportunities given to foreign D1 tennis players who graduate each year. Even if we see more conservative numbers we can’t escape that an enormous amount of money is being used to further the educational opportunities of foreign nationals . With team roster’s limited to 10 spots , it’s a zero sum game in which the opportunity for a player outside the US is one less opportunity for a player in the US. As a precedent , enrollment in high school is not guaranteed to non district residents. It is usually evaluated on a case by case basis and the issue is not “fairness” ,”protectionism ” ” player development ” or ” rigorous competition”. It’s the question of how to allocate finite educational resources.

T. Parham: This seems more pertinent than the suggestion that this dilemma can be cured by American teaching pros and coaches.