The New Language of American College Sports Is Chinese

When the University of Illinois decided last year to offer online Mandarin-language broadcasts of the football team's home games, the play-by-play and color duties fell to a pair of current students, juniors Bruce Lu and David He.

Lu is originally from Changzhou and has been a football fan since his junior year of high school, when he was an exchange student living in Kansas City. He, a native of Chengdu and a sports management major, knew less about the sport and spent three months that summer watching games in order to prepare for the gig.

In the booth, the two developed a quick and easy chemistry—Lu, the serious stats and tactics guy; He, the jokey, casual conversationalist—and made it through the season without complaints. Well, almost.

Turns out He's mother was listening to their broadcasts in Chengdu, capital of the Szechuan Province.

"She said his Mandarin needs improvement," Lu says with a laugh.

Why have schools like Illinois and Indiana University added Mandarin sports broadcasts? Simple. Chinese students may be the future of American higher education.

Thanks to the explosive growth of China's upper and middle classes, more and more families are sending their children to the United States for college. Last year, roughly one in three international students in an American university or college was from China—over 304,000 students, according to the Institute of International Education (IIE).

The big numbers mean big money: the IIE estimates that Chinese students contributed $9.8 billion to the U.S. economy during the 2014-15 academic year.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, American schools are looking for new ways to connect with Chinese-speaking students—current, former, and prospective. Enter big-time football and basketball, which long have served as campus social glue as well as spearheads for alumni fundraising and student admission drives.

School officials at Illinois and elsewhere believe sports can serve the same purpose for students from China, provided those same students understand, attend, and get excited about, say, an Illinois–Ohio State football game.

Currently, school officials say, you won't typically see large groups of Chinese students at major college sports events. Basketball is wildly popular in China, but exchange students are often more familiar with the NBA than with the NCAA; most have had little exposure to American football. The language barrier can also be a factor.

Illinois—which has 5,295 Chinese students, the most of any American university and good for 12 percent of its total student body—is attempting to change that dynamic. Over the past three years, the school's athletic department has increased its international outreach, an effort that has included its football coaches hosting "Football 101" camps for students.

Though the camps were popular and offered discounted tickets to Illinois games, the school discovered international students needed more.

"Despite learning the rules and getting to play football, we heard feedback that many international students still did not feel comfortable watching a game," Karl Feak, Illinois athletic department's assistant director of marketing and fan development, told VICE Sports in an email. "The game moved too fast, there were too many quirky rules and strange penalties."

So Feak was tasked by the department to find a pair of Mandarin announcers from the student body to provide an entertaining and informative audio broadcast. He settled on Lu and He. Last season, the duo's broadcasts averaged around 300 listeners per game—a modest number, but large enough to convince the athletic department to continue the program for men's basketball.

Lu and He's work inspired Indiana University's president, Michael McRobbie, to ask his athletic department to look into starting its own men's basketball broadcast. Like Illinois, Indiana has a large number of Chinese students—about 3,000—and almost 6,000 alumni who are from or living in China or a Chinese-speaking country.

Technology and space weren't an issue; Indiana Associate Athletic Director Jeremy Gray simply needed talent. With the help of the school's Office of International Services and its East Asian Languages and Cultures Department, he put out a request for aspiring broadcasters.

"I was really expecting three or four people," Gray says. "I got about 50 emails back from 50 different students who were interested in doing it."

In part, Gray's overstuffed inbox reflected China's longstanding interest in basketball. The sport was introduced to the country only a few years after its invention in 1891; today, the estimated number of basketball players in China rivals the total number of people in the U.S.

"When I was in high school, they didn't broadcast [live] college basketball; they showed the highlights of the games like once a week," says Indiana student Mirshad Ghalip, an ethnic Uighur from Xinjiang province who is studying for his PhD in linguistic anthropology. "People were interested, but not as interested as they were in the NBA."

Several American schools have sought to capitalize on this interest. Last fall, the University of Washington men's basketball team tipped off its season against the University of Texas in Shanghai. In 2011, a Georgetown Hoyas game against the Chinese Basketball Association team Bayi Rockets memorably ended with a bench-clearing brawl.

This season, Temple University and the University of Dayton also have introduced Mandarin broadcasts for their basketball games, also helmed by Chinese-speaking students. Temple even held a highly publicized "Battle of the Broadcasters" to find their duo.

According to USA Today, the pair eventually will narrate game highlight reels to be posted on YouTube and Youku Tudou, China's version of the video site.

At Indiana, Gray whittled the 50 prospective broadcasters down to 31 students. To make sure everyone has a chance to call at least one of the Hoosiers' 19 home games, he has assigned four broadcasters to each game, with pairs covering each half.

While giving the students some brief training, Gray discovered that sports broadcasting in China is different than in the U.S. While American commentary is heavy on statistics, analysis, and overall, well, seriousness, in China it's usually infused with more personality and humor.

"One thing I tell classes where they're training sports broadcasters is that you have to be natural to your personality and don't try to imitate someone else," says Gray, who used to do play-by-play himself. "I said, 'Whatever you feel is the best way to convey this to the audience listening in Mandarin is the way that I would recommend that you do it. So if you want to do it the very precise American style, go right ahead. If you want a more relaxed conversational and humorous style, and you feel that that's appropriate, go with that.'"

According to Gray, Indiana's Mandarin basketball broadcasts have drawn between 250 and 350 listeners this season. But, as is the case with Illinois' football broadcasts, raw numbers aren't the point—at least not for now.

Shuhan Ma, a senior at Indiana and one of the Mandarin announcers, says that the program has helped to pull Chinese students away from their often closed-off social groups and experience other aspects of the campus life. James Kuang, a junior studying business, agrees.

"I think it really involves international students into the local community," Kuang says. "I know international students are involved, but maybe just in their own communities. I think this is an opportunity for us to really come out and get involved in the big IU family."

Ma says that his parents in Changchun, near the North Korean border, and his girlfriend and friends in Beijing were able to listen to his broadcast. And unlike He, nobody has raised any eyebrows over his Mandarin.

"They feel like it's a start for me, because I major in sports journalism," he says. "Being a basketball announcer was one of my dreams."

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified David He as a sophomore, not a junior. It also misidentified him in a photograph.