For decades American universities did something unusual. They took young people who were not yet good enough and spent years making them better, and out of that came Olympians, national team members, coaches.
On Sunday afternoon, I watched Ben Shelton play for the US Open title. He had beaten Carlos Alcaraz in the quarterfinals in a match that ended at 3:33 in the morning, and in the final he took the third set off the top seed before it got away from him.
Shelton is 23. Four years ago he was playing college tennis at Florida. The last American collegiate player to win a major title was my brother John, who played one year at Stanford.
Almost none of the kids I talk to will get near either of those careers, and they know it. They are asking something much smaller. Whether there is a college team for them at all.
Earlier this year I started counting. At the Southeastern Conference and Atlantic Coast Conference men’s tennis finals, only three of the 24 singles players on court were American. NCAA research, cited last fall by Senate health committee Chairman Bill Cassidy (R-LA), put first-year Division I tennis rosters at 61% to 64% international, the highest share of any sport.
What I watched this spring is less a tennis recruiting trend than a change in what these programs are for. Tennis was where the effect was felt first because it is the most international sport we have. But it is already happening in basketball, soccer, track and field, cross country, golf, and swimming.
To be clear, the fact that the athletes are international players is not the problem. I played alongside international players, competed against them, and later coached them. They make American teams better, and they are doing what any ambitious 18-year-old would do with an opportunity in front of them. They should continue to be welcomed. The question is whether we can welcome the world while still preserving a meaningful pathway to develop our own talent.
But roster spots are finite, and when one athlete fills a spot, another does not.
The families who feel that first are not the ones with money. I talk with juniors and their parents constantly, and almost none of those kids are going to play professionally. Their question is smaller than that.
“Can I play in college?”
That question is what keeps a 15-year-old practicing, competing, studying, and getting up after a loss. More of those parents now ask me whether the answer is still yes.
A mother I know spent years driving her son to tournaments. All he wanted was a scholarship, or failing that, a place on a Division I roster. She told me something I have not been able to put down: she is certain her son and the other boys he trained with would have quit years earlier, and their families would never have invested what they did in developing them, if they had believed college tennis was closing to them.
Open recruiting has raised the level of play. American teams are deeper and better than they were 20 years ago, and some athletes have gotten a great deal out of competing at that level.
The harder question is who ends up on the roster. A cap written into federal law makes me uneasy, and I would rather the NCAA and the conferences correct this themselves, because they understand their own sports better than Congress does and because a number set in statute will be blunt in places where it ought to be precise.
But Cassidy put those numbers in front of the NCAA eleven months ago and asked what it intended to do about them, and nothing the association has written since addresses roster composition.
Wednesday morning, the House subcommittee took up the question in a hearing titled “Who Gets the Scholarship?” where I testified as a witness. I do not expect one hearing to settle anything.
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What I would like is for the people who run college athletics to be asked, on the record, what their programs are for.
Shelton had a university willing to invest two seasons in him. The kids I talk to are all asking whether that same opportunity is still open to them. The answer they get will decide whether they keep playing.
Patrick McEnroe is a former professional tennis player and former U.S. Davis Cup captain.