[GK3]

Lots of great comments on here, but I'll add my 2 cents anyway:

* When we're speaking of just top US recruits, then a top 50 player has a very small chance of beating a top 5 player, and a top 100 player has barely any chance at all. The Tennis Recruiting Network seems to generally have about 25 or so players rated as "blue chip" prospects at the top, but even within that tier, you get some players who are far below others as far as being prospects goes. For example, Emma Sun was a blue chip just like Alexis Blokhina was in the same class, but they're lightyears apart, prospect-wise.
* No, there's no unified ranking of American and international youth tennis players that allows us to compare apples to apples, sadly. In theory, an ITF juniors ranking could be a proxy for that, but like all tour ranking systems, it benefits those who play more tournaments (and go deeper in those tournaments) under that umbrella. So if you've decided to play only a handful of those tournaments while focusing on domestic USTA competition, then your ranking won't reflect your level. 
* With UTR and the newer World Tennis Number, the powers that be seem to be trying to get a quality level in place that we can figure out relative quality, but those numbers are often behind paywalls, so to the extent they're used to create rankings, they're not public-facing. 
* Yeah, Stanford Women's Tennis takes the odd international student, but the team is predominantly made up of American players, while other top teams often have no Americans in the lineup. On one hand, you could look at our hesitancy to add international students as a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" situation, as we're in the mix for a national title darn near every year doing it this way. And perhaps our coaches are hesitant to commit to a player who might just be here for a year or two or three, and they feel they've got a better chance of keeping a player here four years if she's American, as international players do seem to leave earlier more frequently. This program has long effectively recruited itself, so I can understand some resistance to change, but to whom is the program recruiting itself? The American players who have grown up with the backdrop of this program being the gold standard. There are certainly more excellent students among the elite international players out there, and it does seem like we've never made much of an effort in breaking through to that group. And absolutely, we can't just keep effectively ignoring a of immense proportions talent pool. We'll never become a program that relies solely on international players, and we'll always be in on the top domestic talent. But it does seem that a better balance is there to be had.
* As for whether the top collegiate players these days include more international players than they used to, I think that is undeniably true. Of course, "these days" and "used to" are doing some work there, as we'd need to define what exactly we mean to look at the data. But in the current ITA preseason top 25, #2 is Czech, #3 is French, #5 is Japanese, #9 is Israeli, #11 is Belarussian, #13 is Ukrainian, #16 is Mexican, #18 is Spanish, #19 is Ukrainian, #20 and #21 are Canadian, #22 is German, #24 is Japanese, and #25 is Ecuadorian. That's 14 out of 25.
* Some schools start to build pipelines with certain countries because the coaches build connections, and that's seemingly something we've never done (or rather, if we've done it, we haven't seen it bear fruit). Comfort with a coaching staff is obviously massive in any recruiting situation, but it's an even bigger deal internationally. And our most recent international players (Canadian, English, Argentinian but with an older brother here, too) don't exactly indicate that culturally, the tennis team is equipped to support an international player. (Obviously, Stanford as a whole should have a much easier time making that case; but we need people out there making it.)

Thanks, that is the type of info I was looking for.  I had assumed that this was probably way it was.  In almost all sports now days if you do not make an effort to recruit internationally, you will lose out on some very good talent.  Soccer, Basketball, Gymnastics, Swimming and Golf are pretty obviously sports played at a high level by men and women around the world.  Mexico is developing a pretty good softball program and Latin America and Japan have produced excellent baseball players over the years.  So any coach who doesn't work on developing international ties is missing out.
This NYT article on the development of softball in Mexico is interesting.  It shows that even in a country where Machismo rules in many things, things can also change.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/world...yo%20Games).

[GK3]

Lots of great comments on here, but I'll add my 2 cents anyway:

* When we're speaking of just top US recruits, then a top 50 player has a very small chance of beating a top 5 player, and a top 100 player has barely any chance at all. The Tennis Recruiting Network seems to generally have about 25 or so players rated as "blue chip" prospects at the top, but even within that tier, you get some players who are far below others as far as being prospects goes. For example, Emma Sun was a blue chip just like Alexis Blokhina was in the same class, but they're lightyears apart, prospect-wise.
* No, there's no unified ranking of American and international youth tennis players that allows us to compare apples to apples, sadly. In theory, an ITF juniors ranking could be a proxy for that, but like all tour ranking systems, it benefits those who play more tournaments (and go deeper in those tournaments) under that umbrella. So if you've decided to play only a handful of those tournaments while focusing on domestic USTA competition, then your ranking won't reflect your level. 
* With UTR and the newer World Tennis Number, the powers that be seem to be trying to get a quality level in place that we can figure out relative quality, but those numbers are often behind paywalls, so to the extent they're used to create rankings, they're not public-facing. 
* Yeah, Stanford Women's Tennis takes the odd international student, but the team is predominantly made up of American players, while other top teams often have no Americans in the lineup. On one hand, you could look at our hesitancy to add international students as a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" situation, as we're in the mix for a national title darn near every year doing it this way. And perhaps our coaches are hesitant to commit to a player who might just be here for a year or two or three, and they feel they've got a better chance of keeping a player here four years if she's American, as international players do seem to leave earlier more frequently. This program has long effectively recruited itself, so I can understand some resistance to change, but to whom is the program recruiting itself? The American players who have grown up with the backdrop of this program being the gold standard. There are certainly more excellent students among the elite international players out there, and it does seem like we've never made much of an effort in breaking through to that group. And absolutely, we can't just keep effectively ignoring a of immense proportions talent pool. We'll never become a program that relies solely on international players, and we'll always be in on the top domestic talent. But it does seem that a better balance is there to be had.
* As for whether the top collegiate players these days include more international players than they used to, I think that is undeniably true. Of course, "these days" and "used to" are doing some work there, as we'd need to define what exactly we mean to look at the data. But in the current ITA preseason top 25, #2 is Czech, #3 is French, #5 is Japanese, #9 is Israeli, #11 is Belarussian, #13 is Ukrainian, #16 is Mexican, #18 is Spanish, #19 is Ukrainian, #20 and #21 are Canadian, #22 is German, #24 is Japanese, and #25 is Ecuadorian. That's 14 out of 25.
* Some schools start to build pipelines with certain countries because the coaches build connections, and that's seemingly something we've never done (or rather, if we've done it, we haven't seen it bear fruit). Comfort with a coaching staff is obviously massive in any recruiting situation, but it's an even bigger deal internationally. And our most recent international players (Canadian, English, Argentinian but with an older brother here, too) don't exactly indicate that culturally, the tennis team is equipped to support an international player. (Obviously, Stanford as a whole should have a much easier time making that case; but we need people out there making it.)

Thanks, that is the type of info I was looking for.  I had assumed that this was probably way it was.  In almost all sports now days if you do not make an effort to recruit internationally, you will lose out on some very good talent.  Soccer, Basketball, Gymnastics, Swimming and Golf are pretty obviously sports played at a high level by men and women around the world.  Mexico is developing a pretty good softball program and Latin America and Japan have produced excellent baseball players over the years.  So any coach who doesn't work on developing international ties is missing out.
This NYT article on the development of softball in Mexico is interesting.  It shows that even in a country where Machismo rules in many things, things can also change.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/world...yo%20Games).