By Jeff, 8 Asians
When I was an undergraduate, I remember meeting a few Asian American (a grand total of four) at my school who competed in collegiate sports like cross country, volleyball, and field hockey. While I was researching Asian American cross country participation, I came across this web site that has the NCAA (National College Athletic Association) database on ethnicity and athletes . I was curious as to what sports had the most of Asian Americans and what ones had the least. What I found for the 2011 through 2012 season (the latest data available) surprised me in some ways.
Jeremy Lin
There are two ways to look at Asian American sports participation – through total numbers of participants and through percentages. Some sports might have a seemingly large number of participants, but that amount might be a tiny proportion of all the athletes in that particular sport. If you look at the highest number of Asian American male participants, the sport that had the most was a surprise to me – football! During the 2011-2012 year, there were 463 Asian American college football players. Despite that count, those 463 consist of only 0.5% of all of the American football players in the NCAA. The highest percentage was also a surprise – fencing! 79 Asian American male fencers made up 12.4% of all college fencers.
For Asian American women, the highest percentage was in synchronized swimming, with the two Asian Americans making up 22.2% of all nine synchronized swimmers. These numbers are so low as to hint at bad data. The most reasonable highest percentage for Asian American women is the same as men – fencing – with 102 fencers making 15.4% of all college women fencers. The high total number of participants were in tennis, with 417 women making up 4.6% of all female tennis players.
Read the full article by Jeff from 8 Asians.
