College tennis is on the fritz. And Patrick McEnroe, standing courtside at the University of South Carolina in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, felt like it was high time to say what had to be said.
He knows this world from the inside. He was a player at Stanford, a doubles winner at the French Open, a tennis voice that has been revered by many in America because of the path he took on the back of a college pathway that has molded him as a person and a player. And it is precisely because of this that what he is currently seeing is not only troubling him so much.
“College tennis is at a crossroads,” he said. “I came through this system, played at Stanford, gave me world-class competition, world-class education, and a runway into the pros. That happened to be the promise for a lot of American kids, but that promise is getting harder to see.”
In numbers, the promise appears as follows. The proportion of American D1 freshmen on rosters was approximately 70%, 20 years ago. The number today is 40%. The most international major sport in college athletics is now Division I tennis, with approximately 64% of the men’s and 61% of the women’s players in the sport being international. International players have always elevated the college game, and McEnroe has never disputed this. What he contends is that the scale of this shift has been altered, and, as such, it has fundamentally changed who the system is designed to serve.
“When American universities are filled with overwhelmingly international players, we have to ask: are we turning college tennis into a global minor league with American schools footing the bill?” he said.
The driving forces behind this are structural. The transfer portal, NIL, and a win-now coaching culture have all created the circumstances in which recruiting an experienced, ready-made international player merely makes more sense to a college coach than developing a younger one in the United States. The math works on the program in the short-term. In the long run, it does not apply to American tennis. Over the past 20 years, youth participation in tennis among boys and girls aged between 12 and 17 years has dropped 23% for boys and 26% for girls. It is simultaneously eroding at both ends, as more young Americans are not picking up the sport, and fewer are awaiting them in college, even if they do.
The top American player will never miss his or her way. The rankings continue to indicate that. However, the elite is not of interest here. The non-elite player, the kid to whom college tennis was a definite developmental runway with a provision of education, competition, and time to grow, no longer has a clear path. As McEnroe put it on X: “College sports used to develop American athletes. Now it’s short-term wins, global recruiting, and no structure. If American players don’t have this pathway anymore, where do they go?”
His response, which he gave on his SiriusXM show, was straightforward: it is time to have the NCAA, conferences, and even lawmakers (where necessary) to put a limit on the number of foreign players in American college tennis. It is a call that will not pass unnoticed. But the alternative, McEnroe argues, is already playing out in real time.
Tennis programs are disappearing from American colleges
The University of Arkansas, the Razorbacks, eliminated its men’s and women’s tennis programmes despite sitting on a massive financial base. In the 2025 fiscal year, the university taxed a total of 195 million. The combined cost of the two tennis programs amounted to only 2.5 million. It was not about money in any real sense. It was a matter of priority. And tennis failed to get the nod.
The same week, Saint Louis, Illinois State, and North Dakota also announced their respective program cuts. These figures have been on the rise in this direction for some time. In the 2025-26 season alone, the NCAA has eliminated 21 programs, nine of them being at the Division I level. Iona is the only school that has indicated that it will be adding tennis in the future.
McEnroe connected the dots plainly. “If American college tennis doesn’t serve, at least in part, American tennis, then don’t be shocked that more of the athletic directors decide we don’t need this,” he said on his SiriusXM show.
It is a cautionary message to a particular audience. The House vs. NCAA settlement, which currently enables schools to share up to $20.5 million of their revenue directly with athletes, has compelled athletic departments to make brutal prioritization choices. Tennis is a game that yields virtually no income on the college level, making it an easy target. As McEnroe summarized it: “We’ve professionalized college sports without really building a professional system around it.”
In the absence of the college route, the non-elite American players have no other way to go. And when that layer of players passes through, then the depth that gives an elite talent a chance to surface also begins to fade away. McEnroe has his point. Whether the people with the power to act are listening is a different question entirely.
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