At a small Catholic high school near Antwerp, Belgium, a 6-foot-10 basketball player took classes heavily based on discussion and conversation. In Bournemouth, England, 325 miles to the west, a tennis star in the making left his hometown, known for its stretch of beaches on the northern shore of the English Channel, for a small boarding school in Surrey. And across the Atlantic Ocean, in the urban hub of Toronto, Canada, another basketball stalwart more than a foot shorter than her Dutch counterpart attended a private school which, combined with an adjoining public school, had a total enrollment of about 4,000 students.
Andy Van Vliet, Josef Dodridge and Dakota Whyte hail from different parts of the globe. They grew up in wildly varying cultures, moved their way through different school systems and played the game they loved along the way. Now, they’re student athletes at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, still playing the sports they grew up with but acclimating to an academic setting they’ve just now come to learn.
The adjustments from high school to college for these three student athletes range from the comical to the alarming. Van Vliet had no idea what grade point averages were when he came to Wisconsin, and Whyte laughed about how her professors early on worked with her to transition from traditional Canadian prose and spelling to the standards at UW.
“Kohl Center is spelled ‘center’ as in c-e-n-t-e-r and we spell it c-e-n-t-r-e,” Whyte said. “So just little things where I got certain marks off and I kind of had to meet with tutors and they would like ‘you can’t say it this way.’ A lot of my teammates were like ‘you say things so backwards,’ and that’s just because of how I’ve grown up, we have a different way of saying things.”
Dodridge, who attended Reed’s School in Surrey, England, felt the jolt of moving from a school with an enrollment of around 600 to Wisconsin’s vast campus flooded with 43,389 students.
“There were 100 kids in my year and there [were] four tennis players in my year,” Dodridge said. “It was a normal school, it wasn’t like a tennis school, but there [were] only 100 kids.”
Van Vliet’s culture shock perhaps hit the hardest out of the three, as he grew up speaking and learning primarily in Dutch, but was knowledgeable in French, German and English as well. As it turned out, he didn’t know English as well as he thought he did.
“The biggest adjustment for me was having class in a different language,” Van Vliet said, almost too matter-of-factly. “That was so weird at the beginning. It was like, ‘OK, I know how to speak this language, I know how to understand it but you listen to class for a full 50 minutes and that was like, ‘OK, what did he mean by that?’ and then he was already on to something else, explaining something else.”
Their introduction to education at Wisconsin is typical of the nearly 4,000 international students representing 124 countries at UW. There’s the transition into larger class sizes, more impersonal ways of learning through technology and the simple shock of being a college student living away from home. What sets the international student athlete apart, however, is that sports provided an opportunity to move away from a home they knew so well to a culture and an academic setting literally a world apart.
“I think the biggest thing was for me, if I was going to go to a British university, the sport and the academics, they don’t really go alongside each other,” explained Dodridge, the Badgers’ first singles option with a 13-8 record this season. “Whereas here, it’s more established where you can play the sport and do the academics at the same time. If I was to go to England, it’s more like you either go pro or you study, and the studies, I think, are a bit more rigorous. The sports aren’t very—they aren’t taken as seriously.”
Dodridge has discovered in his pursuit to further refine his tennis game that college is easier in the U.S. as opposed to England, where “the studies are a bit more rigorous.” Van Vliet, who is in a similar situation on the basketball court, has found the opposite to be true in the classroom.
“That’s what I heard, that the university over here is a lot easier than Belgium,” Van Vliet said. “Sometimes they compare schools, university in the states to high school in Belgium. That’s what it’s compared to. Some of my other friends who go to college [in the U.S.] and high school in Belgium, they’re saying sometimes it’s a joke. I haven’t really found that out here because it’s kind of a tough school.”
“It’s something you have to adjust to,” Whyte said. “I know my freshman year, I was just all over the place. I struggled a lot with balancing school and balancing basketball. If I would have a bad practice, for a week, school would just be thrown out, I wouldn’t even focus on school because basketball isn’t doing well.
“It definitely carries over, if you’re doing well on the court, you’ll do well in the classroom, and if you’re doing poorly on the court, you’ll probably do poorly in the classroom. That’s one thing that I’ve learned, that they definitely correlate with each other.”
The resources available to athletes to help alleviate those stressors span far and wide. Tutors and advisors, knowledgeable in a wide array of subjects, play an enormous role in helping student athletes select classes, manage their time and plan for their futures. The vast facilities and deep staff dedicated to helping student athletes at UW certainly help ease the tensions of “constantly working and working,” in the words of Dodridge, but men’s tennis head coach Danny Westerman believes the biggest factor in helping international athletes acclimate is the fact that they belong to a team.
“I think being an athlete also really helps the international student athlete, more so than, maybe a little easier than the regular international [student] because you’re kind of automatically a part of a family,” Westerman said. “When a freshman comes in, whether they’re international or not, you have an upperclassman showing you the ropes, showing you around, showing you campus, so I think that’s really helpful.”
Dodridge is on the same wavelength, as he acknowledged that because his tennis skills earned him not only acceptance, but a scholarship to Wisconsin, he feels added pressure to do well in school.
“It helps me in that I think we kind of set ourselves goals and I think the fact that we’re just working hard constantly, it’s like almost a better thing,” Dodridge said. “If we’re working really hard here [at practice], I think it’s almost easier kind of going quickly and then going on to study hard.”
A student athlete’s life is all about balance. It’s finding equilibrium between their hours on the practice field and their time spent studying. For international student athletes, the process of finding that balance is made further arduous by the shock that inevitably comes with adapting to a completely new style of schooling. Despite that difficult transition, the sports that make college accessible to a number of international student athletes also provide a path to academic success.
“There’s definitely more positives than negatives being an athlete, you’re given so many different resources having tutors, the Fetzer [Center], having guidance from your coaches and having a different set of ears with your teammates and always having that resource that you can always use to look to for advice from everyone,” Whyte said. “It’s definitely amazing.”
