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 1980s, as the NBA was becoming more popular and thinking more globally. But international players were almost exclusively identified by word of mouth, recommendations from a friend of a friend. Sometimes, the US coaches wouldn’t even see any game tape before signing a player to a scholarship; in 1984, Dutch player Rik Smits got a scholarship offer from Marist University based on nothing but his height (7’4”); he says the coach never even saw him play.

But today, the NBA and NCAA have built out an international pipeline for players, while the internet has made it easier than ever to scout from abroad. A lot has changed.

What has driven more........

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