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The game drain

Young Kiwi athletes are heading to the US in droves, lured by valuable scholarships and with the dream of becoming top performers in their fields. But for some, the American Dream is not what it might seem. reports.

Kevin Norquay

Hundreds of top young athletes head to the US every year, lured by the chance of a free college education but are those scholarships all they’re cracked up to be and how is the exodus affecting

NZ sporting success?

For a university degree without the crippling debt, the United States is a land of educational opportunity for those who can run, swim, row, shoot hoops, sink tricky putts or bend a football a bit like Beckham.

US college sports scholarships worth $US4 billion (NZ$6.4b) were on offer for young and talented Kiwis in 2019-2020, across 24 sports, with all or part of tertiary fees at colleges or universities covered.

New Zealanders chase them more than most. This country is the second-highest provider of talent per head of population, with Kiwis studying in all 50 states, at more than 400 institutions.

More intense competition and other incentives, are thought to be why Australian athletes go in comparably lower numbers.

Athletic students don’t even have to go looking; US colleges will find them. They have agents talent-spotting and contacting teenage athletes, to sell them a version of a fee-free American Dream.

Of the five Wellington rowers named for August’s 2023 world under-19 championships, all had been approached by US scouts prior to selection. Olympic men’s eight gold medallist Daniel Williamson rowed for Yale.

More than 400 Kiwis are student athletes in the larger and better-funded National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I, which has 363 institutions, including the likes of Yale, Stanford, Providence and Michigan, and the intermediate level Division II, which has 303 options. Those competing at lower levels are not tracked, so the total number of young Kiwi athletes training over there at any one time will likely be higher than 400.

Divisions I and II offer sporting scholarships covering a percentage of tuition, fees, room and board and books, usually for one year and renewable on a yearly basis. Forms of financial or study support are offered by Division III schools, and lower.

Of the 520,000 student-athletes competing in the NCAA more than 20,000 are international student-athletes, Education USA says. Some will flourish, some will not. Some will never come back to New Zealand to live. Olympic swimming bronze medallist (1988) Anthony Mosse got a BA (Hons) and an MBA from Stanford University. He married an American and is now a merchant banker in the US.

While many factors feed into positive outcomes, basketball and rowing are among sports stepping in to make sure their athletes make good choices, or are kept in touch. Basketball NZ (BBNZ) uses NCSA College Recruiting. Rowing NZ has decentralised from Lake Karapiro to allow overseas-based rowers to be part of its international programme.

BBNZ boss Dillon Boucher is well aware of the issues, both as the guardian of basketball and a parent. His daughter Makenzee has spent a year at Midwestern State University in northern Texas after attending Westlake Girls High School.

BBNZ linked with NCSA to ensure students were getting the best advice – it knows of 122 players who are now in the college system, among them Charlisse LegerWalker, who led college side Washington State to the Pac-12 title.

For every Steven Adams (Pittsburgh), Sean Marks (California, Berkeley) and Leger-Walker, there are many who do less well, Boucher says.

‘‘We’ve got some real success stories from college, but we’ve got some real horror stories as well – kids going over then being pigeonholed into areas where they’re just a pawn. If a coach doesn’t like you, you can spend four years not playing and then come back not liking the game. There are athletes that go for one year, absolutely hate it and come home...

‘‘So it’s a real hit-and-miss. What we’re really trying to encourage kids to do is to trust the national body because we’ve seen so many success stories and so many horror stories, that we can give really good advice.’’

Polynesian basketballers tend to flourish in Hawaii, which has a culture comfortable to them, Boucher says. The stretching plains of the midwest, or the frozen northern US though? Not so much. A rural-raised athlete would battle in a rough part of a US metropolis, while Aucklanders would have culture shock in small towns bereft of social options, hours from anywhere more interesting.

Boucher has seen it all, and knows there is plenty he has not seen.

‘‘I’ve been ingrained in basketball my whole life, but these universities in America are completely foreign to me,’’ he says.

‘‘My advice to any parents is: do your homework, as much as you can, so you

understand where your child is going to end up. I know from my experience of my daughter going over there, it’s a massive culture shock. It’s not till you experience it and get a punch in the face that you realise how lonely and how hard it is.

‘‘A lot of them are in smaller areas and less desirable areas, or in university towns because literally the university is the town. They might have 5000 people at the university but outside the university grounds is literally only a Walmart and a bar.’’

Add a demanding coach, or one who ignores you, to culture shock, homesickness, injury or study battles, and the dream can turn dark.

Boucher’s family’s experience is positive. ‘‘Our own daughter, she’s grown up so much. She couldn’t have grown up here as much as she has by being away. She’s having to do things on her own, for us as parents, that’s the best. Being away is about life experience, more than about basketball. We wanted her to go, have a great experience for four years, and come away with a degree. There were moments when it was touch and go. She wants to go back for a second year. So for us, that’s a success story.’’

Craig Kirkwood, an Olympian who coaches triathlete Hayden Wilde and 1500m ace Sam Tanner, went to the Division 1 University of Oklahoma in Norman as a runner. Now he has athletes looking to follow his spiked footsteps.

When he went to Oklahoma – which has around 32,000 students in a city the size of Dunedin – it was a shot in the dark. No information was available online. He made mistakes, he says. When things go wrong it is not a failure to admit it and return home.

Kirkwood sees two types of athletes, with the college system good for only one.

Scholarships are a real bonus for athletes below elite level who get a high-quality education. But those with lofty sporting goals such as the Olympic Games or the World champs might do better elsewhere, he says.

‘‘I’m not sure that the university system is right for them. They all kind of get sucked along with it, and say ‘I need to go to the US’, whether it be right or wrong for them. Stubbornly, sometimes they stay over there when it’s probably not the best move, and they should probably just return home, say after a year or two up, if it’s not working out.’’

Tanner (Nga¯ puhi) a 3min 51.70sec miler, gave Washington State only a year. He returned home to run sixth in the Commonwealth Games 1500m, his 3min 31.34sec putting him ahead of 1976 Olympic gold medallist John Walker and second to Nick Willis on the New Zealand all-time list.

‘‘He enjoyed being at university and other teammates and what have you, but his running wasn’t really kicking off there,’’ Kirkwood says. He was missing his large family so felt he needed to be settled to produce his best. And so it proved.

Universities expect performances from day one, which is intense pressure, and it’s not a very supportive environment around women’s health and well-being, Kirkwood says.

‘‘They require you to be academically capable and stay academically eligible, you

‘‘They all kind of get sucked along with it, and say ‘I need to go to the US’, whether it be right or wrong for them.’’

Craig Kirkwood, right

can’t just kind of skive off and not go to lectures. But they want you to perform in sport.’’

Kerry Hill, when director of coaching for Athletics New Zealand, researched what happened to Kiwi talent that went into the college system. He was stunned by the results.

His own findings, backed by subsequent research, suggested more than 90% of scholarship athletes either never returned to New Zealand, or – if they did – recorded worse performances than prior to their study overseas. At the time Hill was horrified from a sports point of view, but he now admits he’s come to see the many benefits outside his focus on athletics.

‘‘It’s a loss of talent. We probably in most instances won’t get them back to be any better, there are examples but let’s wait and see,’’ Hill says.

When people tell him their kids will be back as international athletes, he has his doubts.

‘‘We’ve been waiting 40 years, and we haven’t seen many people do that. On the other hand … they get a free education and an exciting place to live. That opens their eyes to the world... I’ve changed my view to one that we’ve really got to do a lot of homework around your own personality, and also on whoever is selling you the story, the coach, the university, the agent. Do they really care about you? Are they using you for their own purposes?’’

Come up with the right answers, and you might live hap- pily ever after – student-loan-free.

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2023-05-28T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-05-28T07:00:00.0000000Z

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