The rise of European recruits in DI men's golf

The UK has been a recruiting hotbed for a while. Likely due to the advantage of speaking the same language, college coaches seem to have been early adapters to recruiting golfers form the UK. When we look at a linear regression of golfers from the UK by year, the trend (below) is slightly positive although it seems to have leveled off.

Here’s the same graph filtered for Power-4 schools.

Number two on the list is Canada with 1,004 athletes amounting to just over 14 per cent. This one also makes sense considering golf’s popularity in Canada combined with the proximity, especially to northern schools.

Europe now supplies over half of DI’s international players

The most striking change, though, comes from Europe. In this 20-year span, Europe has accounted for more than half of the international recruiting to the division, as as shown in the two graphics below.

And if we look at count of all Europeans (not just UK-born players this time), we see a steep increase.

So what’s happening here?

Much of Europe’s early impact came from a few established golf nations: Germany, France, Sweden, and Spain. All of these countries have had 74 or more freshmen across the 20 years in this dataset. From this group, we see a sharp increase in the early 2000s, followed by a leveling off over the past 10 to 15 years. Good players have been coming from these countries to DI rosters for a while, as seen in the graph below left.

The next wave: Smaller European nations are surging
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