The States most Impacted by up-tick in International Recruiting (Men's DI Golf)

Last week, we looked at the The Declining Rate of U.S.-Born Men’s DI Golfers over the last 20 years.

In this post, let’s look at which states have been most impacted by the increase in international recruiting.

Most states have seen a decline in afforded DI roster spots over the 20-year period. The big driver is the up-scaling of international recruiting.

THE BIG THREE

Unsurprisingly, the biggest three states in this dataset are California, Texas, and Florida. Those three states account for just over 25% of U.S. Born Freshmen added to DI rosters in this dataset.

California and Texas are the states with the highest number of DI Men’s Golf Teams. I’ve included 16 California schools, and 19 Texas schools in this dataset. The coaches in these states also recruit in-state at a rate well above the DI average (53% for the entire 20-year period).
(California 60% and Texas 56%).

The in-state recruiting in these two states has gone down over the 20-year span, but only marginally.
The effect for Texas and California-born freshmen has been a slight decline in number of DI roster spots.

Florida is a bit different to the other “big three” as the 7 schools in my dataset have really shifted their recruiting.

Since COVID, in-state recruitment at the Florida schools in this dataset have significantly dropped, and is now below 30%.

Despite the shift in in-state recruiting, Floridians have experienced similar drops in roster spots compared to California and Texas. Recruits from Florida have remained in the 6-7% range of all US recruits during this entire period - it’s just that more Floridians are going out-of-state to play their DI Golf.
The most popular out-of-state schools for Floridians are Liberty (11 players), Mercer (9), and Penn (8).

OTHER STATES

Virtually every state I’ve looked into has had declining number of DI roster spots over the time period we’ve looked at (2005-2025). The recruiting-landscape has grown more competitive with the globalization of recruiting combined with decreasing roster sizes.

In short, I see no particular state single-handedly stand out as percentages within U.S. Born players have remained fairly stable.

There are likely some local dynamics/trends I’ve missed here though.

You can look into your home-state in this way ⬇️

You can use the report to filter for your state of interest on this page of the report:

Use the two-letter abbreviation for the state you would like to filter for, and hit enter.

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Here’s the link to the report.

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