If lately it seems like college tennis has become more ‘international showcase’ and less ‘home-grown proving ground,’ that’s because it has. In 2005, roughly seven out of every ten incoming Division I tennis freshmen were born in the United States. Two decades later, that number sits below four in ten.
I've scraped and organized every publicly available DI tennis roster I could find from the past 20 years. The database covers more than 73,000 unique player-year entries from men's and women's programs across the country. I built it to answer a question that had been nagging me: how much has international recruiting actually changed the composition of college tennis? The answer turned out to be more dramatic than I expected.