Right or wrong, PAC 12 women’s tennis coaches are looking outside their state to fill their tennis rosters.
The short report “Gender of Coaches and Residence of Players – PAC 12 Tennis 2013” looked at the rosters of PAC schools during the month of April 2013 and found that 32.7% of the players were in-state. Of the 101 players, 26.7% were out-of-state and the remaining 40.6% were foreign players.
A majority of the USC and Stanford players were in-state (8 of 11 and 7 of 8). Four schools did not have any in-state players, including both Washington schools, Arizona, and Oregon. ASU only had 1 in-state player.
Stanford had no foreign players and USC only had one player from out of the country. More than half the players on the Arizona, Oregon, California, Washington, and WSU teams were from foreign countries.
For a similar analysis on men’s tennis go to the post “Are There Too Many Hired Guns in Men’s College Tennis?“
I am curious if it may be because the college world from a coaching perspective is all about what have done lately (winning). If someone doesn’t win now, they are out, and it is my experience that most kids grow up in a general tennis club environment with surface level coaching (where it is impossible to learn the grit and sacrifice needed to succeed at the collegiate level). So the schools that do go after american players are going after a fairly small pool of elite players at this time… my hope is to change that, but like anything, it will take time.