Friday, March 11, 2011

Loading Up Teams With Foreign Talent

Here's an article from the BBC on how colleges load foreign talent onto their teams in the hopes of dominating the sport. In this case, the sport is tennis: "No other American college sport has more international players than tennis." 

However, US squash fans have heard the same discussion about college squash for years -- 13, in fact.

However, there is another angle to this story worth noting. One commenter to the BBC article, "Dedjiridoo," wrote the following: 

"I played men's squash, a sport that that has been dominated for the past 12 years by Trinity college. Trinity has recruited the best players in the world--junior champions from England, India, Pakistan, and South Africa. This was intimidating as a player, but also a wonderful challenge. We knew that we were competing against the absolute best and it raised the standard of the league."

That's a good point.

1 comment:

  1. I agree that foreign players can certainly raise the overall level in the national league but I can't help but wonder at what cost at the lower levels.

    My club has had hired guns play for our best team and has spent quite a lot of ressources on it. I can't help but wonder what these ressources could have done for the club if they instead had been spent on attracting new players or on developing juniors.

    ReplyDelete

Sorry, but due to increasing spam, I've added the Word Verification step. My policy on comments is anything goes, as long as it is about squash and as long as it isn't unnecessarily nasty....