Vox reader Brian Diederich asks: Why and how do so many collegiate basketball teams — both men’s and women’s — now have so many international student-athletes?
If you’ve turned on March Madness this year, you’ve witnessed the most international players ever in college basketball’s signature competition.
Across both the men’s and women’s brackets, 264 athletes — 15 percent of all NCAA players in the tournaments — hailed from outside of the US. They are a cross-section of humanity, representing 45 countries in the women’s tournament and 52 in the men’s.
The number of overall international college basketball players more than doubled from 2010 to 2025. It is a trend across sports: 25,000 of all US college athletes were born in another country.
Forty years ago, US schools put little thought into recruiting players from Africa or Europe. A handful of players started to come to the US to play college ball in the…