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Author Topic: Different end game, Preference, Parents' want? No opportunity esp. us SE Asians?  (Read 98 times)

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Offline theking

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Why there are so few Asian Americans in major U.S. sports

The cacophonous gyms of Texas were, in many ways, Natalie Chou’s second childhood home. More than a decade ago, with bangs covering her forehead and black hair bouncing, Chou grew addicted to basketball north of Dallas, amid the squeaks of sneakers and the trill of young voices. She made friends through the sport. Concocted dreams through the sport. By middle school, she’d decided that this — a game she loves for its universality — was where she wanted to be.

And yet a part of her felt out of place. “Alone.” “Different.”

At the time, she didn’t quite understand why. But the occasional comments from AAU opponents offered hints. “Their team has an Asian? That’s so weird,” some would whisper. Chou says that a few would match up with her, and inform their teammates: “I got the Asian, this should be easy.”

Dots connected in 2014 at USA Basketball tryouts. Upon being named to the U17 national team as one of the 12 best girls her age in the country, Chou, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, found out that she was the first Asian American to ever make the cut.

That’s when she began to realize. “Oh, wow,” she thought. “I really am on a path that no one has walked before.”

Her experiences — “I never looked like my teammates, or anyone that I played against,” she says — align with those of many other Asian Americans who’ve ventured deep into mainstream U.S. sports. Some 20 million people of Asian descent now comprise 6% of the U.S. population. And yet, in 2019-20, players of Asian descent made up only 0.7% of NCAA Division I women’s basketball players; 0.4% of Division I men’s basketball players; and 0.3% of Division I football players.

In professional leagues, the dearth was even more striking. Just 0.4% of NBA players were of Asian descent; and 0.1% of NFL players; and 0% of WNBA players.

In fact, for as long as experts can remember, perhaps for as long as organized American sports have existed, Asian groups have been underrepresent ed. The reasons are as diverse and nuanced as the Asian American population itself. It hails from dozens of different countries and distinct cultures, from different generations and circumstances that make it the most disparate minority group in the U.S. Experts say that any search for answers — to the question of why so few Asian Americans reach the pros — must begin with an acknowledgment that Asian Americans are anything but homogeneous. The barriers that Chou faced, as a second-generation Chinese American in Dallas’ suburbs, are different from those that Indian immigrants might have faced in California, which are different from what a Cambodian refugee might have faced in Atlanta.




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