Inside Report: High School/College

Patriot Games

International recruits are giving 'home team' a whole new meaning

By Kelley King

Connecticut's Svetlana Abrosimova (with ball) is just one of many foreign athletes making a huge impact in the NCAA. Al Tielemans

When Shannon Miller, coach of the Minnesota-Duluth women's ice hockey team, began building her team in early 1999, she pursued Tuula Puputti, a goalie for the Finnish Olympic team. In addition to offering her a full scholarship, Miller asked the men's coach to check out Puputti's boyfriend, Pasi Korhonen, a former Finnish junior national team player, and, if he met their recruiting standards, to go after him. Duluth took both players. On the January day that Jyväskylä, Finland, said goodbye to two of its finest young athletes, Duluth's newest team, anchored by Puputti, two fellow Finns, two Swedes and six Canadians, began its Cinderella journey, culminating with a national final four berth.

Accompanying boyfriend aside, Puputti's story is becoming increasingly common. Women's collegiate programs, newly bolstered by funds allotted through Title IX legislation, are finally able to woo exceptional foreign talent, as men's programs have done for years. (Pancho Segura played for the University of Miami in the early 1940s.) Still, college organizations are just now beginning to track numbers. Nevertheless, interviews indicate international recruiting is up in every women's sport, most markedly in tennis -- of the 100 females ranked by the Intercollegiate Tennis Association at the beginning of March, 48 called a country outside the U.S. home. "When we started a few years ago, one quar-ter of our student-athletes were females," says Charles Auffray, cofounder of International Sport Partners, an on-line international student-athlete placement service. "Now it's about 50-50."

Some worry that this trend will cause America's Title IX daughters to lose scholarship money to foreign athletes. "We're derailing the revolution in the name of winning," says Vanderbilt tennis coach Geoff Macdonald, who has yet to carry a foreign player on his team, a perennial top 15 finisher. "Title IX was meant to give girls a chance, but now we're telling Americans, 'If you're not world class, you can't play.'" This attitude, Macdonald surmises, is relayed from athletic departments to coaches, who feel pressure to succeed. Indeed, weeks after the end of the Wisconsin ice hockey team's 19-14 inaugural season, Badger coach Julie Sasner was in the stands at the Swedish national championships. "My job is to build a successful program," says Sasner, whose 1999 squad carried only one non-American, a Canadian. "And every coach is finding out where you've got to go to do that."

Often that place is Europe. Connecticut basketball coaches have gone abroad to watch players like Svetlana Abrosimova, a native of St. Petersburg, Russia, who led the Huskies in rebounding this season. USC crew coach George Jenkins, who has put French, Slovakian, Australian and Czech talent in his boats, regularly scouts at international regattas. "Europeans and Australians come here, raise the bar and make everyone better," says Jenkins, who says Title IX should benefit not just U.S. women but all talented female athletes, regardless of nationality. "It's not charity, but competition. We're not importing these kids as mercenaries," he adds. "They must have a minimum GPA and SAT score and go through the same application process as everyone else."

Even so, adapting to a new country can be difficult. "Speaking and studying English are two very different things," says Ipek Senoglu of Turkey, one of eight foreign players on Pepperdine's tennis team. To bond his team, Pepperdine coach Gualberto Escudero takes his players on a preseason camping trip, which he says helps them "respect each other right away."

Escudero understands such adjustments; the Bolivia native came to the U.S. in 1960 and has been recruiting globally for 17 years. But not all athletes stick around. Depending on sponsorship opportunities, Senoglu may head back to Istanbul. And in April, Puputti defended Finland's goal against some of her college teammates at the Women's World Hockey Championships in Toronto. "It was strange to play against my friends," says the pride of Duluth, "but home is home."

 
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