A Spanish sports blog is reporting that UVA Basketball recruiting target Thijs de Ridder, a 22-year-old Belgian power forward, is being held up by NCAA eligibility issues, and has decided to play the coming season in Paris.
I’m not hearing this as being confirmed with respect to de Ridder, a 6’8” power forward who had been getting talk about being a possible second-round NBA Draft pick before deciding to test the D1 waters first.
The word behind the scenes making its way to me the past couple of weeks had been that de Ridder was just waiting for a thumbs-up from the admissions office at UVA.
It’s fair to speculate here what the impact of the Trump administration’s recent push to make it harder for international students to matriculate at U.S. colleges and universities might be having here.
The news on that front on Tuesday was that the administration has ordered U.S. embassies to pause scheduling new interviews for student visa applicants as it weighs requiring foreign students to undergo social media vetting.
You know, to make sure that they haven’t said anything bad about Trump, probably also Vladimir Putin.
I’m not viewing the recent tough words from Trump on Putin as being anything other than a work, in case you’re wondering if I’m up on the latest regarding U.S.-Russia relations.
Now, I would assume that de Ridder, and also 6’11” German center Johann Grünloh, would have already gone through whatever vetting would have been necessary in their cases, which have been playing out for several weeks.
ICYMI
I’d also assume that Trump, a known jock-sniffer, would make it so that the toadies in his administration would go easier on athletes than it would kids who want to come here to study international relations or gender dysphoria.
In this respect, the UVA Board of Visitors bending the knee to Trump in killing the school’s DEI programs might be a help, in terms of us getting tall Euro kids into school to be able to play basketball.
The new coach hiring an evangelical to be the director of culture can’t hurt there, either.
ICYMI
- UVA Basketball: Odom hires evangelical to serve as ‘director of culture’
- UVA Board of Visitors does Youngkin’s bidding: ‘DEI is done at the University of Virginia’
As long as the rules are applied evenly across the board, we’re not necessarily at a disadvantage.
Might not hurt to have one of our big donors snatch up several million dollars of Trump’s worthless fake money just to make sure we, ahem, get equal treatment.
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Chris Graham
