Football, basketball and baseball have been the United States' most popular sports for as long as anyone can remember.
Tennis is not as popular as those sports, so many college sports teams travel outside the States to find talent for tennis, soccer or swimming.
In particular, men's tennis in the SEC is made up of approximately 40 percent foreign-born athletes. Every SEC team has at least one foreign player except for the University of Alabama, according to team websites.
Two-thirds of Auburn's team this season is composed of European players, according to Auburn's roster.
The top Southeast high school players primarily come from Georgia and Florida. Between Alabama and Auburn, there's only one home-state player.
Tennis head coach Eric Shore said they're just tennis players to him, but it can be hard to find American tennis talent.
"There's only so many Americans to go around at this level," Shore said. "There's probably about 30 or 40 guys that come out a year that can play D-I tennis at this level."
Shore said the other options for teams are to try and compete with the second tier of American players, which Shore said is like "beating your head against the wall," or you can go international.
Junior Marko Krickovic of Munich said the opportunity to play sports and get a college education isn't available back home.
"One of the reasons so many Europeans come is because they don't have college sports," Krickovic said. "So usually you have the decision to either turn pro, you go to college in Europe and don't play sports or you come to college here."
In addition, sophomore Maxime Hinnisdaels of Belgium said there are still a large number of top-tier foreign players who retain their amateur status because there is such a small amount of European players from each country that get picked for international tournaments. such as the Fed Cup.
"The other guys that are still really good, if they have enough money, they will try [going pro], but if they don't, they have an issue because they want to play tennis." Hinnisdaels said. "But then college tennis opens up, and those guys are probably better than (Americans) that didn't make it through United States Tennis Association."
Coach Shore said although the American players he's found have been great competitors, he's seen that there's a different approach to tennis in European countries as well.
"The American kids understand 'team' more because they play more team sports growing up as a whole," Shore said. "But on the other side, the international kids grow up faster because their parents don't go to every tournament with them. They don't tell them how great they are. They don't do everything for them."
Of the last 10 winners of the singles NCAA title, seven of them have been international players.
Two of the three American titles were won by the University of Southern California's Steve Johnson, who is currently ranked 37th in the world, according to the Association of Tennis Professionals rankings.
The Tigers start the team match portion of their schedule in January, and the team is confident they will improve upon a season in which they finished 42nd in the nation.
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