Collegiate Sports in China and in the U.S.: Conversations with Student Athletes
Inside the world of competitive collegiate athletics in China and the United States: cultural difference as reflected in sports and the structural difference that lead to the relocation of some student athletes.
Yin Rou’s golf bag. Courtesy of Yin Rou.
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Xie Jinyun trains every day from nine in the morning until noon. Usually, these are combat and tactic trainings, which focus on his techniques. And then in the afternoon, he trains again, focusing on his strength for another three hours.
Having started his badminton career in the second grade, he now represents Huazhong Agricultural University in Hubei Province, China. He is a first-year student studying Economics.
He says that although the recruitment process varies from sport to sport, most commonly, students who are second-class athletes or above are eligible to compete in high-level, cross-school, sport-specific competitions to gain entry into universities. Athletes who have the best results at the competition have the most choices.
There are about 30 universities across the country that recruit high-level badminton athletes, Xie says. He adds that there is another way to gain entry into universities as a student athlete, through institutions that specifically look for high school students who excel in athletics. The major differences are that the two groups compete in different games and the latter usually have fewer options when it comes to picking majors:—most of their choices are sports-related. The different recruits play in different divisions: Xie plays division Jia (A) and the other group plays in division Yi (B).
Xie adds that his training schedule was much more intense in high school, when he was preparing to apply to college through professional sports. The training was day-long, and he had little time for academics.
Yin Rou’s locker. Courtesy of Yin Rou.
Student athletes in Mainland China are a relatively recent invention.
It wasn’t until 1977 that universities in China reopened their doors to students, shortly after the end of the decade-long Cultural Revolution. Gaokao, or the national college entrance exam, was restored the same year. A year after that, in 1978, the special admission policy allowing students who excel in academics, the arts, and athletics to gain favorable entry came about.
Even though this policy began to die down around 2014, and was completely canceled in 2018, the desire for universities in China to obtain talent remained. Thus was born the new policy where high-level, cross-school, sport-specific competitions alongside Gaokao results determine where student athletes go to school.
All the way across the Atlantic, Jiang Chengye of Northwestern University in the United States is also a badminton enthusiast. He usually goes to the school gym, Blomquist, to train two times a week from seven to nine at night.
Jiang is a senior double majoring in Industrial Engineering and Economics.
He plays on the Club Badminton team, and the team is predominantly Asian, Jiang says. The team doesn’t have a coach and the training sessions are very spontaneous. They also don’t receive funding, and they only compete against other teams in friendly matches.
Yin Rou and teammates. Courtesy of Yin Rou.
As opposed to badminton’s popularity and Olympic success in China and other countries in Asia, badminton remains a backyard sport in the US. This explains why, despite being the only badminton team on campus, Jiang and his crew don’t meet varsity standards, meaning they never had the chance to access top-performing teams with funding, top-tier coaches, facilities, scholarships, and sometimes even registration perks.
Jiang says the best memory he has with the team is grabbing fried chicken with his teammates at the school cafeteria after training.
While more than 30 universities across China recruit badminton athletes, badminton is not officially recognized by the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA).
The different stories coming from Xie and Jiang show only a small part of the vastly different collegiate sports culture in China and in the U.S. At its more surface-level interpretation, this stems from the different histories behind college campuses.
Compared to China, the establishment of collegiate sports has a much richer history in the US.
The NCAA was established in 1906, but intercollegiate sports existed long before the NCAA. Universities on the East Coast began organizing intercollegiate crew matches in the 1850s.
And as Chinese universities categorize divisions by different recruit types, the US categorizes divisions by various factors, such as the number of sports schools sponsor and athletic scholarships. Northwestern University, where Jiang attends, is a Division I school.
US colleges also attend different conferences, whereas Chinese institutions usually hold nationwide games.
The NCAA is also very profitable. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the yearly revenue for the NCAA surpassed $1 billion, which mostly came from broadcast revenues of football and basketball games.
The rough equivalent of the NCAA in China is the Federation of University Sports of China (FUSC). However, the FUSC is much less profitable and was founded quite recently in 1975—it remains mostly an administrative body. The FUSC doesn’t disclose their annual profit, but save for the sponsorship deals from the Chinese University Basketball Association (CUBA), the FUSC doesn’t come close to bringing in the kind of revenue March Madness or football conferences such as the NCAA is able to bring in.
II
Even though policies in China attempt to ensure that student athletes also get a good education, some still turn to America in search of a better balance between academics and athletics.
Somewhere else on Northwestern’s campus, Yin Rou, a golf athlete, has a much busier training schedule than Jiang. Yin, a sophomore studying psychology, plays for the varsity golf team and trains around 21 hours a week—getting even busier during the competitive season. When it comes to school work, Yin says she has always been very busy and has sometimes had to work on her assignments at the airport when flying to another city for her golf games.
Yin started her golf career when she was in the fifth grade. She said she started playing golf because her dad was a regular golfer and hoped that she could join him on the field. She then found out that she was good at the sport and her family decided to invest more in her training. She attended a private international school in Hangzhou, China to have more free time to play golf when she was in middle school. Then, she attended Bishops Gate Golf Academy in Orlando, FL to further her training. She made the decision to part ways from the traditional Chinese public education system when she was in middle school.
Reflecting on the lives of her Chinese golfing peers, Yin said that their day-to-day schedule in college includes a lot more free time than hers. And while Xie, the badminton athlete in Hubei Province, says that almost none of his teammates will become professional athletes, Yin says all but a quarter of her teammates wish to “go pro.” Although this preference differs from sport to sport, overall it is quite difficult for college students to become professional athletes in China because the best teams —teams that represent the city, province, and of course, China at large— recruit players very early on, and going to college could be a potential waste of precious training time. Therefore, it is up to the student to decide if they want to pursue academics or to excel at their sport. For those who want to pursue both, they must look elsewhere for balance.
Ryan Fieldhouse at Northwestern University at dawn. Courtesy of Yin Rou.
Yin is not alone in her decision to move overseas for more leniency in her training and academic schedule.
Peng Jingyi of Dartmouth College is a junior studying economics and digital art. She is a tennis athlete who started playing tennis when she was in middle school. Back then, she lived in Beijing. But soon her family made the decision to move to New Jersey and to homeschool her to accommodate her training schedule. In the morning, she trained two hours a day with her coach at a private club, and she had clinic training with her peers in the evening, after they finished school. In between her time on the court, she also had fitness training.
In high school, her parents first took a lot of initiative to convince her that training and homeschooling were the right decision. At first, she couldn’t understand the choice her parents made, but over time, her conviction in tennis grew, and she is now glad things turned out the way they did.
The hard work earned her good results: she ranked Top 60th nationally before college. She says that because she was homeschooled for a very long time, it took her some time in college to get used to the strict assignment deadlines. She also enjoys the team dynamics, which played a very big part in her decision to apply to Dartmouth.
Northwestern golf team. Courtesy of Yin Rou.
While Yin and Peng both moved overseas during high school, Niu Yiyi looked to non-traditional education in China. She is a sophomore fencer at Notre Dame University and she attended Beijing No. 4 High School International Campus.
Niu started fencing in primary school when she was eight years old. Her interest in sports grew and she progressed to play at a fencing club outside of school. She later trained with the Beijing Team. Niu says that, compared to sports like table tennis and badminton, fencing is a relatively new sport in China, making it possible for non-professional student fencers to train with the best resources. In high school, she traveled outside the country many times for games and she played on the women’s soccer team at school.
Niu says she is the biggest advocate for her fencing career: her parents didn’t want her to treat fencing as anything more than a hobby. But she kept on practicing fencing and eventually made it onto the Notre Dame team. However, her enthusiasm for a career in professional fencing recently died down. She says it is partly because of COVID-19: the pandemic messed up her plans for international competitions. Her results were also below her expectations before the pandemic hit. Peng, the tennis player at Dartmouth, also had plans to become a professional athlete in high school. With reasoning similar to that of Niu’s, she also decided against that path.
III
Yin Rou and teammates. Courtesy of Yin Rou.
These student athletes’ stories sketch out the parameters of the cross-Atlantic cultural differences in collegiate athletics—along with sports culture in general. All of these factors tie into the massively different systems in which the two countries train their athletes.
Overall, student athletes in the US have more games to play than their peers in China because of the many different tournaments and opportunities set up by the NCAA. In the US, student athletes are also given roughly the same academic schedules as their non-athlete peers. In China, however, the situation varies from school to school. Some have less class time than others.
More generally, family units pay a large portion of money in raising a world-class professional athlete in the US; college is a great place for young athletes to compete at very high levels before they have to decide whether they want to become a professional athlete. However, the expenses in facilities and private coaching also meant that certain sports are not accessible to all students. On the other hand, in China, most of the costs in the creation of a world-class athlete are usually covered by state-run administrative bodies, including the national and regional Sports Bureau, as well as grassroots talent-spotting systems. This often means that, while college athletes in the US graduate college to become Olympic athletes and professional athletes, those in China who get to compete in professional leagues and the Olympic games rarely get the chance to attend college.
The fact that people had to choose between sports and academics is a major push factor for people like Yin, Peng, and Niu, who chose to study overseas. Other factors are also crucial in the making of their journey: their personal commitment and performance are paramount, the ability of their families to invest in their athletic abilities in a niche sport is rare, and of course, the prestige of top US universities on future job prospects is undeniably alluring.
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China is looking to the USA to innovate on its current collegiate athletics model. An article in 2017 said that hundreds of university administrators from China have “visited the PAC-12 schools to learn about how they combine athletics and academics to develop more well-rounded student-athletes and make sports an integral part of a university’s culture.”
Yao Ming, the NBA retiree, is among the advocates who are pushing China to learn from the NCAA.
However, collegiate athletics in the U.S. has become a contested topic in the aftermath of the 2019 Varsity Blue college admissions scandal. Wealthy parents were able to bribe their children into prestigious universities through agreements with coaches and athletic recruits. An opinion piece by the Daily Princetonian pointed out that “athletes from rich towns are siphoned into elite universities.” The article also points out that the Ivy League schools usually host more sports teams than public universities. This difference can translate to more recruits in sports that are less publicly available and rely more heavily on facilities and resources inaccessible to middle and working-class families. At the same time, according to data presented by 247 Sports, the most profitable sports teams are often football teams from the American South and Midwest, not the Northeast, where the Ivy League schools are located. The student athletes I spoke to who represent a U.S. institution all play niche sports.
Complaints have also been made about student athlete pay: is it socially and morally responsible for student athletes to risk injuries in games that could potentially bring schools millions of dollars in annual revenue when they are getting meager pay.
These are the problems both countries need to confront when moving forward with intercollegiate sports.
Contributor: Scarlet Li
Editor: Emily Zhang, Veronica Lin
