The Season Pass

    On Tuesday I spent the afternoon at the Centennial Center Tennis Complex watching our teams battle Valdosta State, and while the Bobcats dropped both matches, I noticed something that sparked my interest: all the different languages that were being spoken by players in the complex.
    That afternoon players originally hailing from Brazil, France, Equador, Sweden, Australia, Belarus, Germany, Britain, Belgium and the Czech Republic competed.
    This got me thinking – on a campus where nearly every student is from the state of Georgia, how many international student-athletes are on our teams?
    The answer is 19 for the 2007-2008 school year, most of which compete on either the golf or tennis teams. However, the men’s cross country team has three foreign players one each from Canada, Belize and Germany.
    This seems really cool to me. I have talked to some of our coaches in the past about what a great opportunity it is for these foreign players to come and get a strong education, an opportunity they may not have had in their home countries.
    After Tuesday’s match, I talked with redshirt junior Erick Siqueira for a little while about what it is like being an athlete from a foreign country at GCSU.
    Erick, from Sao Paulo, Brazil, said he has really enjoyed his time at GCSU.
    In fact, he said he plans to stay in Georgia after graduating in May of 2009.
    I asked him if it was hard being so far away from his family, and he simply said that it really wasn’t – that he adjusted to it pretty quickly.
    Erick said that for South Americans, in general, it is unusual for them to leave their families for college, but he was up for the challenge.
    Very few, if any, of GCSU’s foreign student-athletes will play professional sports, but everyone of them that I have talked to used their abilities to acquire an education.
    I take my hat off to each and everyone of them, and want to say thank you to them for their contributions to our athletic department and our campus community.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Apr 11 2008. Filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry