THE NCAA SCENE has changed dramatically in recent years, as old-school athletics and modern-day money have battled in the courts, and earthshaking verdicts have given us a college landscape that would be nearly unrecognizable to a time traveler from a generation ago. Now there’s big-time NIL money, super conferences, recruiting services, and, you just may have noticed, more foreign athletes than ever.
It doesn’t take much digging to see how much the picture has changed in just the last 10 years. At the NCAA cross country Regionals in ’15, 30% of the men’s top 10 finishers were internationals, and 21.1% of the women were. In the qualifying races this year, the numbers jumped to 60% for men and 62.2% for women. At Nationals, the top 40 individuals get All-America recognition. In ’15, 30% of those men were foreign, and 32.5% of the women. This fall, those numbers exploded to 72.5% for men (29 of the 40) and 62.5% for women (25).
The many changes within the NCAA ecosphere are responsible, says Rita Gary, the head women’s coach at Furman. “It’s really just opened up a floodgate of allowing athletes into the NCAA that in history would not have qualified by the limit of age or by the parameters of education.”
The other force is the ever-present mandate for top programs to win. “People want to keep their jobs,” said one of several coaches we talked to who did not want to be named. “You’re looking for a higher-level athlete and if you can’t get the best American kid, you’ve got to get one [internationally].”
“It’s a real-life thing that’s happening,” says Oklahoma head James Thomas. “People are adapting to the new times. There’s haves and have-nots when it comes to who has NIL money, who has potential revenue sharing, who has other outside types of things. And right now, it’s hard to get in a battle for some of the top kids in the U.S. unless you are employed at a really high-end, top institution with a reputation academically and athletically… So battling for the international athletes is just a way for a lot of programs to stay afloat.
“There’s a whole lot of schools and programs that are still being expected to win and perform well. [International recruiting] is becoming something I feel like almost every program is leaning on a little bit.”
“Foreign influence” is by no stretch a new phenomenon. At the first NCAA Track & Field Championships in 1921, Dartmouth’s Earl Thomson, Olympic high hurdles gold medalist for Canada the previous year, won his event.
Fans have long been used to seeing certain track/XC programs that have traditionally had top-notch foreign talent on their rosters. One thing that has marked the current influx is that programs that in the past have predominately recruited Americans are now pulling in surprising numbers of international athletes, some competing at a very high level.
“Oh my gosh, yes,” agrees one coach who has won national titles on the strength of his foreign imports over the years. Now he faces more competition than ever for those recruits.
Says another, “There’s a lot more people that are hopping on board and saying, ’You know what, let me give this a go now, too.’” (Continued below)
Tsunami By The Numbers
Sometimes a chart best tells the tale. These two compiled by Peter Thompson — a British-born, Eugene-based coach and well-known international clinician — cast the pointy end of the current collegiate distance running pyramid in stark relief.
Rule Changes Have Opened The Door
One of the biggest barriers to international athletes from some countries coming into the NCAA went away in January ’23. That’s when the NCAA, on the heels of the Covid pandemic, permanently eliminated the standardized SAT and ACT tests from its requirements for new athletes. Athletes still need high school diplomas with 16 NCAA-approved core-course credits on their transcripts, but critics says this marked a huge drop in standards. “We’ve thrown academic requirements out the window,” says Gary.
Amateur status is still required, however. A number of coaches who would not be named say that the investigation of possible cases of foreign runners accepting pro money is not rigorous. Several Kenyan athletes in particular have been the cause of many rumors in this department. “Pro” payments, apparently, are easily concealed as travel/lodging expenses, which are allowed.
Then there is the age issue. Back in the ’70s much controversy raged over foreign athletes dominating NCAA track and cross country. In fact, our April 1977 cover — under a photo of UTEP senior Wilson Waigwa, who won that year’s NCAA 1500 at age 28 — featured the headline, “Foreigners Dominate NCAA.” Inside, a number of articles and letters to the editor hashed it out in language that would set déjà vu flags waving for current fans. The NCAA struggled at the time to make an age rule that would survive legal challenges.
These days, there is no set age limit, per se. Rather, athletes must comply with the 5-year rule, meaning they get four seasons of competition within 5 years from their first full-time college enrollment. The NCAA grants athletes a free gap year between high school graduation and college enrollment without any loss of eligibility. After that, the clock starts ticking. Except for when it doesn’t.
Exemptions are frequently granted for religious or medical reasons, but the big loophole for older international athletes is the national team exemption. Delayed enrollment can be granted for athletes participating and trying out for national team competitions, including the Olympics and Worlds.
An athlete does not even have to make their national team to get the extension. They just have to try; they can get all of those seasons exempted, provided their paperwork is deemed up to snuff by the NCAA Clearinghouse.
Explains Sam Seemes, CEO of the U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association, “Internationally, a lot of countries choose their national teams based on a body of work. So sometimes an international student can have their eligibility clock start much later than a U.S. student. And even though they’ve been training and competing, maybe at a world-class level, their eligibility clock may not start because for them, that’s all a part of their body of work that would make them possibly be selected for a national team.”
The door is wide open, agrees Thomas: “If they’re good enough athletes and they’ve had opportunities to compete and train at the world level, that doesn’t count against them.” And that’s how we get a 29-year-old, Washington State’s Solomon Kipchoge, winning the West Regional as a sophomore.
Not to pick on Kipchoge, a transfer from Texas Tech. He was one of at least 10 athletes over 25 to make a Regional top 10, according to numbers researched by Peter Thompson, the keenly observant coach and clinician who has drawn up several informative charts and graphs like the two seen earlier in this report.
Being older than most American collegiate athletes is not a defining trait among the current influx of international competitors, says Seemes: “I think most international students line up just like student athletes from the U.S. do and are regular student athletes coming out of high school trying to get a degree and compete. But,” he adds, “I think there’s been an increase in people that are able to access it at a more advanced age, and in some instances, a more advanced stage of being ready to compete.”
The money question also needs to be addressed. BYU men’s coach Ed Eyestone recently told the Deseret News, “They’re coming because of NIL.”
However, foreign athletes can’t receive NIL payments, which are forbidden by the terms of the F-1 student visa. One can surmise that a violation, especially these days, would lead to a prompt deportation, and not necessarily to the athlete’s home country. Yet there might be more to this angle that we have not been able to nail down for obvious reasons. Some of our sources say that a common end-run around that rule is to deliver payments directly to athletes’ accounts in their home countries.
What’s Driving The Recruiting?
Coaches identify several key factors in their recruiting internationally. One noted that the merging of a number of conferences into super conferences is a major motivator. “That made it really, really hard to be successful.”
For many others, though, the prime impetus are the new NCAA roster limitations: 17 in cross country, 45 in track — and 10/35 for SEC schools. Coaches, many of them hoping to reach performance bonuses in their contracts, feel they can’t afford to let too many spots be taken up by developmental athletes who don’t have potential to score in their Conference or at Nationals.
Says Thomas, “I’ve had multiple national champions and All-Americans that were books or walk-on kids that may have never had that opportunity in this current system. But we also don’t have that luxury now of going 30-40% success rate with your athletes. You’re going to have to be in that 50-60% success rate with your athletes or that’s called ’a significantly poor season’ when it comes to the administration.”
He adds, “With roster sizes changing, they’re going to want to get more instant success, and therefore, going with a foreign athlete is more likely. If you get a 20-year-old, say, French male or female athlete, they probably have done the European U20 or U23 championships, so they’ve got international experience, which U.S. high school athletes [generally] don’t have. International experience which takes them much further away from the American kids coming out of high school.”
Joe Franklin, now coaching at Louisville after many successful years at New Mexico, cites a quote from Cardinals basketball coach Pat Kelsey, “We choose to embrace change rather than just complain about it.” He adds, “Pretty pointed, isn’t it?… People have to embrace change, if you don’t change, you die.”
Recruiting Services Have Changed The Game
Long a feature of revenue sports in the collegiate world, only in the last few years have recruiting services become prominent in track and cross country. The days of an assistant coach flying to Eldoret to scout young Kenyan talent trackside are numbered, if not already over.
Thomas says one of the reasons is simply financial. “A bunch of programs have been getting budget cuts… The opportunity to go out there and watch every international kid, there’s programs that used to be able to do that all day long. Now they can’t do that at all. From a business standpoint, you’re relying on some of the recruiting services. There’s a new one that pops up every week, and I’m sure there’s a lot of programs taking full advantage of a lot of them.”
There are several recruiting services in play, with the two most prominent being Scholarbook Premier, a worldwide service based in Germany, and Townhall Premier Talents, which focuses on Kenyans. How crucial are they to providing the athletes that fans are cheering at nationals?
Counting JUCO, NAIA and the NCAA’s three divisions in indoor and outdoor track last year, Scholarbook says its alumni scored 26 national titles and 129 first team All-Americas, including Div. I winners such as Doris Lemngole (steeple), Samuel Ogazi (400) and Aleksandr Solovev (PV). Past alumni include decathlon world champion Leo Neugebauer and 800 Olympic and world champion Emmanuel Korir.
Townhall qualified 60 of its alumni to this year’s NCAA Div. I XC Championships. Last year, NCAA champions Ishmael Kipkurui (10K) and Pamela Kosgei (5/10K) both came through the Townhall pipeline.
Rumors abound about how the recruiting services work. While Townhall did not respond to our interview requests, Scholarbook did. Joe Walker III, a former Div. I coach himself, is the relationship manager for schools looking at East African athletes. He explained that the service started in ’09, founded by two former NCAA runners from Germany, Simon Stützel and Thomas Bojanowski. For years the company contracted directly with athletes, mostly German at first, who wanted to be shopped to American programs.
“We flipped the model probably four years ago,” says Walker. “On a trip to Kenya and Nigeria, Simon found that a lot of those athletes obviously can’t afford over a thousand dollars in fees right up front for basic things, visa fees, applications fees. So 1764456066 we’re able to provide our services for free to those athletes.”
The American schools foot the bill these days, through a system where a subscription fee gives the access to a pool of athletes. That gives the recruiters everything from contact info to video-confirmed performance results, as well as Scholarbook staff handing visa applications and most of the other logistics of the athlete’s move to the U.S. The top tier, which highlights the best prospects, is the All America package. That runs $30,000 a year. Other packages go for as little as $6000. Even so, buying a subscription doesn’t guarantee a school a new recruit.
“We’re definitely not a placement,” says Walker. “I think there’s an idea out there that someone is paying for an athlete. We absolutely can’t do that.” What subscribers get, says one college recruiter, “It’s a smaller group of people that you’re battling against to get the recruit.”
Notes Walker, “We’ve had one school take 13 kids in one calendar year. We’ve had others that have struck out, got zero. Nothing’s guaranteed. But with the All-American package, those are pretty high-end kids, most schools typically average two commitments per year.”
That’s just how one service does business; others likely operate quite differently.
The services have changed everything. Says Thomas, “I used to get on social media all the time and connect with kids internationally and go to World Athletics and look at them on Instagram and all this kind of stuff, but if you connect with them now, it’s probably already too late. They already are connected with one of these services, and so you’re kind of wasting your time trying to recruit them on your own. They belong to somebody already. I think that’s why people are leaning to that route instead of doing the legwork on their own.”
The experience is different for the athletes too. Gary points out, “[As far as I know], they’re not coming over for official visits. They’re not spending time with the team or on the campus or meeting with academic advisors, all the things that we think about with the NCAA recruiting and how we want to be this holistic fit where they’re growing academically, they’re growing athletically, they’re growing spiritually, like it’s a multi-dimensional growth opportunity. Maybe I’m old school or idealistic, I don’t know, but that’s not happening.”
She wonders what happens down the road for these recruits. “Are [the coaches] still invested in their well-being and their longevity, their family, health and wellness?… I think when NCAA programs recruit from these environments, without any oversight, it really sends a dangerous message, both to those athletes that we’re recruiting, but also to our domestic kids. And just to our public in general… it looks bad for us. I think in 5–10 years, people are going to lose their appetite. No one wants to watch the Kenyan National Championships at the NCAAs.”
Notes Seemes, clarifying that it’s his personal opinion rather than a USTFCCCA stance, “There are businesses now built on being able to supply athletes for a fee. I’m not saying that’s illegal by any means of imagination. But I have some problems with it from an ethics standpoint. You know, it’s not too far off of selling human beings. Somebody’s offering you an athlete and you’re paying for them to deliver that athlete. Some of this paperwork that goes through the clearinghouse, I think, gets professionally completed and filled out by folks who work at knowing the rules and how to go around the rules and answer the right answers to the questions that are in front of them that don’t raise a red flag.
“I’m very surprised that this hasn’t risen to a high level within the NCAA. And I’m really surprised that the U.S. government hadn’t gotten involved in it to a certain extent, especially with what is going on around the human trafficking and visas and entries into the country and so on.”
It’s possible the Trump administration’s work to limit foreign visas has had a clear effect on foreign student enrollment. The Institute of International Education surveyed over 800 colleges and universities and found that foreign enrollment has dropped 17% for the current school year. Walker says Scholarbook has noticed an effect: “Our Euro numbers are down, perhaps starting with family concerns regarding Trump’s attacks on higher ed.”
Another possible issue, says Thompson, is that World Athletics rules require athlete agents to be registered. It is unclear if any of the recruiting services employ registered agents, or whether there could be any consequences. “I don’t think World Athletics is particularly aware of the situation,” he says.
He also points out that Seb Coe’s hopes to get cross country back into the Games [the Winter Olympics seem to be the leading idea] could have an eventual effect on the international pipeline. “National Olympic committees have not allowed any development funds to go to cross country, because it’s not an Olympic event. Once cross country comes back into the Olympics, then the potential is for the national Olympic committees to fund the development of cross country runners, male and female, around the world. So it’s going to become more important for countries to consider what’s happening to their athletes.”
A Legislative Solution?
Gary says she is introducing legislation in December at the USTFCCCA Convention: “I’m tackling just the age issue, basically what I’m proposing is that your eligibility starts at 20 years of age, regardless of what country you’re from, what educational system you went through, religion, all of that stuff, and that you have five years to exhaust four years of eligibility. That will make sure that 25 years of age is the upper limit.”
“I personally think there’s some challenges when you start saying age,” notes Seemes. “That’s easy term to use in discussion. But when you get down to a document, you’ve probably got to approach it in a different direction, even though the intent is the same.”
Louisville’s Franklin is dubious: “I would find it hard to believe that it could get through and actually get in the NCAA manual with all the changes. And then what is the NCAA’s appetite for another lawsuit? I don’t know the answer to that. But somebody will sue, somebody will get eligible, it will set precedent, and then something will happen.”
Lost Development Opportunities?
This all may result in athletic administrators taking a closer look at track/XC budgets, says Gary: “One of the things that our body sold to our administrators and our ADs and our presidents was that we needed 45 roster spots and 17 roster spots for Olympic development. That was one of our arguments. I think what we’re doing is a bit of a hoodwink because I’m pretty sure they probably thought it was U.S. Olympic development, not necessarily world Olympic development.”
Thompson has doubts about the oft-heard mantra that competing against foreigners will make U.S. collegians better. “When you’re talking about 60% of the top 10 are international athletes, then it’s no longer acting as a stimulus. It’s acting as a block.”
There are positives, says Oklahoma’s Thomas: “The fact that there is a way for some of these athletes to get to the U.S. a little bit easier is actually making the sport, in my opinion, a little bit better and a little bit more inclusive for people who probably would never be able to come to this country and compete. I think this is allowing a lot of people who are sub-elite, would-be elite, hopefully get to that elite level.”
Thompson, who has long worked in international coaching development, points out another consequence to the foreign influx: “Those developing athletes are taken away from their home country coaches. Those coaches don’t develop, and then when the athletes go back to their home country, they’ve grown beyond the coach, and so they either don’t go back and keep competing in the U.S., or if they do go back, they may give up training and competing.”
He recalls a trip to Jamaica in the early ’90s, when he heard from a number of coaches, “’Our job is to get our athletes U.S. scholarships.’ They were all unanimous. There was no development of coaches, because coaches never worked with anybody beyond high school.” He discussed the problem with the head of the federation, and eventually a coaching development program started at the University of Kingston. One of the eventual products of that effort was one Usain Bolt. “He never wanted to go to a U.S. university. He always wanted to stay at home if he could and train.”
Final Thoughts
“Their job is to win,” says Gary of her coaching peers. “And I’m not even saying they’re winning the wrong way. I refuse to say that. They’re winning fair and square. I just think as a sport, we can do better. I think as a coaching body, we can do better. And I think this is a call-to-action time, because we’re looking around and everyone’s going, ‘What the hell is going on?’ And we need to get our arms back around it. And like the pendulum, it just swung too far.
“I will say, these athletes bring an incredible ability and also global recognition to college running, which is something that we want. But what’s lacking right now are just some basic guardrails for how do we still get that diversity and that influx of talent, but create some parameters that level the playing field and keep fair competition. The NCAA’s mission when it was founded was to ensure fair play among student athletes; it wasn’t supposed to be a semi-professional league.”
Franklin sees it differently: “If you’re promoting only American athletes or age-limited athletes or… whatever the flag that you’re carrying is, if you’re true to that your entire life, I’m good with it. But I feel there’s a lot of hypocrisy because, you know, are you driving an American-made car? Is your refrigerator American-made? God forbid somebody in your family gets sick, are you only going to a doctor that was born and raised in [the USA]? The answer is no.
You don’t care whether they’re born in Ann Arbor, or Indiana, or Bangladesh, or the United Kingdom. You want the best physician possible. And some of those people that become those physicians come in on athletic scholarships.”
Beyond that eternal debate, there’s general agreement that the recruiting game is boiling down to a battle of budgets, and the winners will be the best-funded programs who can bring in the best international stars. Says Thomas, “We have no clue how bad it’s actually going to get and what schools are going to benefit, what schools are going to be hurt from it.
“There’s going to be a couple of them that probably will have collections of superstars, almost like the Infinity Stones, and they’re going to almost become untouchable at some point.”
