Athletics are a big driver of Canadian undergraduate enrollment

Senior Cadence Pero, an Ontario native who's one of the captains of the UM-Dearborn Women's Ice Hockey team, never thought she'd be playing collegiate hockey. In Canada, the competition is stiff for rosters on professional teams or at Canadian universities, and Pero assumed she simply wasn't good enough or wouldn't get noticed. But when she was 16 years old and playing in a league in London, she ended up chatting with one of her teammates, who had just signed to play at UM-Dearborn. Following her teammate's lead, she set up a profile on a recruiting site, where she discovered that she might have a lot more opportunities to play in college than she thought - if she was willing to go to the United States. There were dozens of schools, both in the NCAA's Division III and in the American Collegiate Hockey Association, the league in which UM-Dearborn plays, that were looking for players.

To her surprise, Pero started getting recruited by several American colleges and reached out to several more, including UM-Dearborn, which showed interest in her. She eventually narrowed it down to UM-Dearborn and Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where her uncle played NCAA Division I golf and her cousin is currently playing golf as well. Pero says UM-Dearborn won out for a few reasons. For one, it's only two and a half hours from her home, so her family could "be part of this experience with me." (Pero says her grandparents come to almost every game.) She was also impressed by the athletic and residential facilities. The women's team had its own locker room and UM-Dearborn had its own rink, so she could practice anytime. And the Union, where many student-athletes from outside the metro area choose to live, had full apartments rather than the one-room dorms and communal bathrooms she was expecting. Pero also says the University of Michigan name carries more weight back in Ontario. "The Michigan degree, that was a big thing for my parents," she says. "I thought about schools like Indiana Tech. But if you're going back home with a degree from Michigan or Michigan State, you're going to have more opportunities."

One other big factor was affordability. Pero had excellent grades in high school and thus qualified for UM-Dearborn's merit-based international undergraduate scholarship, which "basically knocks off the out-of-state fees." Women's Ice Hockey Head Coach Carrie Sirola says that's something she hears a lot from her Canadian players. "We're not able to offer them athletic scholarships, but the international scholarship that UM-Dearborn offers, which is based on high school GPA, can make a huge difference," Sirola says. "So if a kid has a 4.0, I know they're going to get $12,500 a year. I can tell them, if you want to play, you're going to get a fair bit of financial aid here." Sirola says that scholarship - along with the high level of hockey that the women's team is earning a reputation for - has been a big reason she can now court more Canadian players. Back when the team was founded in 2019 and Sirola was an assistant coach, she says the team was filling the roster mostly with student-athletes from the metro Detroit area. But she could foresee that building the team would likely require recruiting in Canada. "I would be doing recon on our opponents and every single team in the U.S. now has Canadian kids," she says. This past year, UM-Dearborn's team featured 14 Canadians and 10 Americans - the first year the team has had a Canadian majority. Because of the scholarship, Sirola says she's started to become more "particular" about who she recruits. "I've started to mostly recruit kids who have a 3.0 or higher, because I know we're going to be able to offer them financial aid," she says.

Sirola says her recruitment doesn't always resemble how it's often portrayed in movies or TV, where eager coaches come watch from the sidelines and make a pitch to kids and parents. For starters, Sirola says most of her recruitment activity is online now. Athletes use recruiting websites or YouTube to upload their highlight reels, and if there's a mutual interest, a lot of the subsequent communication happens via email before the students come for a tour. Interestingly, Sirola says a lot of the Canadian players who end up on the roster actually find her rather than the other way around. She says this is largely due to a substantial supply and demand problem: Because hockey is so popular in Canada, there are simply more players in Canada, especially at the mid-level talent band, than there are spots on Canadian college rosters. So college-bound students who want to keep playing find they have many more opportunities if they reach out to teams in the U.S., where hockey isn't as popular but college teams are more plentiful. "Occasionally, I'll find a kid and reach out to them. But it's going to be harder to get them to come because they're going to have offers from other coaches," Sirola says. "I find it's easier for me to sign kids that really want to come here."

That an American university close to the Canadian border would be drawing hockey players from Canada, where hockey is a national obsession, isn't all that surprising. But Craig Cotter, head coach of the UM-Dearborn Baseball team, says a lot of Sirola's experience rings true for him, too. Cotter and his assistant coaches started to notice more Canadians on their opponents' rosters, and so they started scouting Canadian kids on recruiting sites. A couple guys from the coaching staff even attended some combines in Canada to scout potential recruits in person. This year, UM-Dearborn had three Canadians on the roster - including a first-year student who Cotter says was the standout player for the team. Cotter says the selling points that seem to be drawing hockey players are pretty similar for his players: Ontario kids like that UM-Dearborn is just across the border (although one of his players came all the way from Alberta); students love the accommodations at the Union; and the international undergraduate scholarship makes the out-of-state tuition much more affordable for students who did well in high school. Interestingly, the supply and demand dynamic that brings hockey players to the U.S. works a little differently for baseball, though it still seems to benefit American colleges. "Baseball in Canada is just not that big a deal compared to a sport like hockey," Cotter says. "So kids at that sort of mid-talent level, if they want to keep playing through their college years, are going to find way more opportunities in the U.S."

UM-Dearborn doesn't keep stats on countries of origin for its student-athletes. But using some back-of-the-envelope math, athletics seems to be driving undergraduate enrollment from Canada, which is now the university's second-largest source for undergrads, and very close to overtaking the top spot, now held by India. Francisco Lopez, UM-Dearborn's director of international affairs, says there were 26 Canadian undergraduate students enrolled in 2024-25. So adding Sirola's 14, Cotter's three, and the five Canadian student-athletes on the men's ice hockey team, it's safe to say that athletes account for the large majority of Canadian undergraduates. Which begs the question: Will the university continue to experience growth in this area? Cotter and Sirola aren't bullish about that forecast, at least for their teams. One thing that's on both their minds: the current exchange rate. The Canadian dollar has fallen to its lowest level in a decade relative to the U.S. dollar (right now, it's 72 cents), which puts Canadian families at a disadvantage when paying for college. Because of this, Sirola says she's thinking of shifting her recruiting focus away from Canada and to communities in Michigan outside of the metro area. (Interestingly, she says she has trouble recruiting kids in the territory where most of UM-Dearborn's undergrads hail from.) Meanwhile, Cotter is looking to recruit more out-of-state students, especially in southern states, where baseball can be a year round sport and there is a lot of mid-level talent. As with his Canadian athletes, he says his best recruiting tool is often an academic scholarshipthe university offers to high-achieving high school graduates from out of state. "The Michigan degree is desirable throughout the country," Cotter says. "So I'm hopeful we're going to get kids that, yes, want to keep playing, but come for that degree."

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Story by Lou Blouin

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