October 13, 2025 • by Mikkel Bjerch-Andresen
Former college golf coach and college golf analyst Mikkel Bjerch-Andresen crunches the data to reveal the changes in how DI men's programs are recruiting across Europe.
I scraped Division I men’s golf rosters back to 2005, totaling over 40,000 player–year entries. Even with incomplete coverage, the data clearly shows one major shift: the rise of recruits from the European mainland. What started as a UK-heavy pipeline has evolved into a continent-wide recruiting network, reshaping the competitive map of college golf.
In a post on my substack, I recently wrote about the declining rate of US-born players in Men’s Division I golf. As I have about 60 per cent coverage of player nationalities (when I compare my scraped data to the NCAA Participation report), I multiplied the “from”-rates to cover the gaps in the data. Using this assumption, we can look at how many DI-roster spots are awarded to different locations in the world.
The scrape produced 7,002 athletes over the 20-year span that included international “From” data. When we look at the biggest contributors to the men’s DI pool, it’s probably no surprise that the United Kingdom tops the list. The Brits invented the game, after all, plus their mother tongue is likely a big advantage; 1,220 athletes or about 17.5 per cent of the international athletes are from the UK across this period.
The UK has been a recruiting hotbed for a while. Likely due to the advantage of speaking the same language, college coaches seem to have been early adapters to recruiting golfers form the UK. When we look at a linear regression of golfers from the UK by year, the trend (below) is slightly positive although it seems to have levelled off.
Here’s the same graph filtered for Power-4 schools.
Number two on the list is Canada with 1,004 athletes amounting to just over 14 per cent. This one also makes sense considering golf’s popularity in Canada combined with the proximity, especially to northern schools.
The most striking change, though, comes from Europe. In this 20-year span, Europe has accounted for more than half of the international recruiting to the division, as as shown in the two graphics below.
And if we look at count of all Europeans (not just UK-born players this time), we see a steep increase.
So what’s happening here?
Much of Europe’s early impact came from a few established golf nations: Germany, France, Sweden, and Spain. All of these countries have had 74 or more freshmen across the 20 years in this dataset. From this group, we see a sharp increase in the early 2000s, followed by a leveling off over the past 10 to 15 years. Good players have been coming from these countries to DI rosters for a while, as seen in the graph below left.
It’s when we group non-traditional European powerhouses (above right) that we see the sharpest recent incline in the number of DI athletes. This graph represents athletes from Ireland, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Iceland, Finland, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Netherlands, Slovenia, Austria, Slovakia, Portugal, Bulgaria, Russia, Poland, and Estonia — and these are just freshmen on DI rosters.
College coaches are increasingly recruiting from smaller European countries. These recruiting trends don’t happen in isolation; they’re visible on the ground at Europe’s biggest junior events.
I wish I had attendance data of college coaches at the major European junior-golf tournaments. Unfortunately I don’t, but I can anecdotally tell you about the increase.
The two biggest recruiting opportunities in Europe every summer are the European Boys Team Championship (EBTC) in July and the British Boys Championship in August. I played on the silver-medal Norwegian team back in 2010 at the EBTC. As the tournament was held in Turkey, just a single collegiate golf coach made the trip – Bill Montigel of TCU.
Later on, as a coach, I attended the tournament on recruiting duties a few times. I’d estimate 30 to 50 college coaches being present. You couldn’t walk a fairway without spotting another coach watching the same group. I’ve heard it’s similar at the British Boys Championship in August. European recruiting has really boomed.
Speaking of the EBTC, the results from the past three years show some interesting countries as it relates to college recruiting. In 2023, England won beat Sweden by nine shots but there were some interesting nations on the leaderboard: the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Finland, Slovenia and Slovakia.
A year later, France won the stroke play with the Netherlands, Austria, Finland, Switzerland, Denmark and Italy inside the top 1o, and Iceland finishing above both Wales and Ireland.
These are just the stroke play results. The championship ends in a matchplay bracket for the top eight teams. However, if we look briefly at these results over the past three years, we see some familiar flags performing well. England, Sweden, France, and Germany have all made the top eight every year. Spain had an uncharacteristically poor performance in 2024 and seems to not have qualified in 2025.
However, my attention goes to the Czech Republic, which has made matchplay twice and won the stroke play portion of the event on home soil this year. In addition, Switzerland is on an impressive run. I can guarantee college coaches are actively recruiting players from these countries.
It’s clear that college coaches are now thinking globally — turning over new stones in their search for talent and opportunity. In the early 2000s, Europe’s surge was driven mostly by established golf nations beyond the UK. But over the past decade, the map has widened: smaller countries are now sending waves of players across the Atlantic, reshaping what “international recruiting” means in college golf.
A similar pattern may soon unfold in Asia and Africa. Much of the world is still in its golf infancy, or remains largely untapped by recruiters. What began as a narrow UK-to-US pipeline has expanded into a truly continental network. Division I golf is no longer just an American game, it’s becoming an unmistakably global one.