Hoops an international language
Women’s basketball has seen mammoth surge in foreign players since 2012
Uconn’s Lou Lopez Senechal, center left, and Dorka Juhasz, right, hold the Big East Championship trophy as they celebrate with teammates after defeating Villanova in the conference finals at Mohegan Sun Arena on March 6 in Uncasville.
STORRS, Conn. — When star guard Paige Bueckers went down with a season-ending knee injury last August, Uconn went searching far and wide for a late addition to its roster.
The Huskies found one overseas in Inês Bettencourt, a point guard from Portugal’s mid-atlantic Azores Islands. An assistant coach had noticed her playing at the Division B U18 European Championships.
A couple of months later, the Huskies announced the signing of a player they hope will be their next dominant forward: Jana El Alfy, who is 6-foot-4 and from Egypt. She enrolled in January and joined the team but will not play until next season.
The Big East champions are headed to the NCAA Tournament as a No. 2 seed with six international players on the roster after having just 10 others since Geno Auriemma began coaching the team in 1985.
“There was very little video of them back then,” Auriemma said. “Today, we have video and those kids have video of everything; they see everything. They watch every one of our games and we have a chance to see them during the summer more because there’s more international competitions.”
“It’s not the answer to everything,” he added. “But in certain situations it is, for us, the exact right way to go.”
It’s also a trend across women’s college basketball.
The NCAA, citing numbers provided by FIBA, said there were 731 international women playing Division I college basketball in 2022, up nearly 350% from 212 in 2012.
Pac-12 Tournament champion Washington State, a No. 5 seed, has nine international players on its roster, including all five starters.
Johanna Teder, a senior guard from Estonia, said she thinks there is something in the makeup of players willing to go halfway around the world to pursue their dreams that has contributed to her team’s success.
“It’s a big decision,” she said. “Us internationals, we’re more experienced and like independent, if that makes sense. So, maturity plays a big role.”
South Florida won the American Athletic Conference regular-season title and is a No. 8 seed in the NCAA tourney, with eight international players.
USF coach Jose Fernandez has been recruiting heavily overseas for the last two decades. He said he started looking to Europe and elsewhere because his program was having a hard time competing with bigger names in college basketball for top players in the U.S.
What he found, he said, is a bunch of very talented kids who were often more emotionally and intellectually prepared for college basketball than their American counterparts.
“I don’t think I’ve had an internationalplayerevergraduate with less than a 3.5 GPA, whichisamazingwithenglish being their second language,” he said. “There’s also there’s no entitlement, right? A lot of these international recruits they’re not getting two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight pairs of shoes, and four or five different jerseys and, and, and getting treated like American high school prospects are treated as eighth, ninth and 10th graders.”
He said he used to see three or four other U.S. college coaches and international competitions but now sees about 40 or 50. El Alfy began getting noticed by U.S. college coaches as a member of her national team, which is coached by her father, while attending camps sponsored by the NBA.
“They really helped me a lot with everything, especially with their camps all around the world, not just in Africa,” she said. “I was able to like go to Australia and also be on a different environment and different culture.”