Duke’s Dame Sarr (7) slams in two over Darren Harris (8) during the Blue Devils’ open practice at Cameron Indoor Stadium in Durham, N.C., Tuesday, August 5, 2025. Ethan Hyman ehyman@newsobserver.com
For the third time in four years, Duke is bringing in a key recruit from overseas. Unlike Tyrese Proctor or Khaman Maluach, Dame Sarr didn’t have to worry about running afoul of NCAA amateurism rules or whether an unpaid year or two in college would help burnish his NBA draft potential.
Sarr is a 19-year-old freshman swingman from Italy, straight out of the pro pipeline at Spain’s FC Barcelona, a late addition to Duke’s roster because it made as much financial sense for him as it did basketball sense for the Blue Devils after incoming transfer Cedric Coward left for the NBA.
Sarr isn’t alone. North Carolina has three international players, two transfers from other NCAA schools and 22-year-old freshman Luka Bogovic, a 6-foot-6 guard from Montenegro. N.C. State has 22-year-old freshman center Musa Sagnia from The Gambia, who was also playing professionally in Spain.
Nor are the Triangle schools alone. New Virginia coach Ryan Odom expects to rely heavily on Belgian forward Thijs De Ridder and German center Johann Grunloh. Neoklis Avdalas, a 6-foot-9 guard from Greece, is likely to run the point for Virginia Tech. The influx of international players from overseas pro leagues had a massive impact on this recruiting cycle not only across the ACC but the entire country.
And it’s not hard to figure out why.
“It’s pretty straightforward, really,” Duke coach Jon Scheyer said. “I mean, at the end of the day, they all wouldn’t be coming over here if they weren’t going to get paid. That’s just the reality.”
The next big change in college hoops
Just as the ability to capitalize on their name, image and likeness extended the college careers of players like Armando Bacot and R.J. Davis, who made more money staying in Chapel Hill than they would have playing overseas, the ability to recruit players who played professionally and pay them competitively in the wake of the House settlement has opened an entirely new class of players to college basketball.
There has always been a trickle of academic-minded Australian, European and African stars — Proctor and Luol Deng come to mind, among others — along with a steady flow of fringe players who could meet NCAA eligibility and amateurism standards, but the doors to college basketball have now been thrown wide open to college-aged players who came up in the youth systems of European pro clubs and would never even have considered leaving before.
North Carolina guard Luka Bogavac (44) launches a three-point shot over North Carolina center Henri Veesaar (13) during the Blue-White scrimmage on Saturday, October 4, 2025 at the Smith Center in Chapel Hill, N.C. Robert Willett rwillett@newsobserver.com
This is happening across college sports, especially in hockey, where players from Canadian major junior leagues — long deemed ineligible by the NCAA, forcing players to make either/or career decisions as teens — are now open to recruitment, essentially doubling the recruiting pool overnight. If colleges could pay players directly now, why should a stipend from a Canadian Hockey League team be disqualifying? (As always, it took a lawsuit for the NCAA to acknowledge its own hypocrisy.)
The presumptive No. 1 pick in the NHL draft, Gavin McKenna, left his Canadian team to play for Penn State in his draft year. Jaxon Williams, the son of former Carolina Hurricanes star Justin Williams will play for the Ottawa 67s of the Ontario Hockey League this year without forfeiting his NCAA eligibility as he would have in the past; he’s committed to play for Wisconsin next year.
A summer recruiting bonanza
The effect on college basketball isn’t quite the same, given the predominance of the United States as the primary generator of college players, but the sudden ability to recruit international players with professional experience who would previously have been both ineligible and uninterested flipped the tail end of the recruiting cycle on its head.
Sarr and Bogavac both committed in May. N.C. State, after losing recruit Paul Mbiya to Kansas in June, picked up Sagnia in August, not only filling a major void on the roster but adding a potential impact player at a time when there’s not usually anything left worth adding.
“The first practice, a couple of our guys were like, ‘Golly,’ and I was like, ‘Didn’t you Google him or anything?’” N.C. State coach Will Wade said. “This guy declared early for the NBA Draft and did like five NBA workouts. This kid’s a real player. We didn’t go dumpster diving. We didn’t find him on the trash heap. This guy’s a real player.”
N.C. State freshman Musa Sagnia speaks with reporters during media day at Dail Basketball Center on Monday, Sept. 22, 2025, in Raleigh, N.C. Kaitlin McKeown The News & Observer
For schools like St. Mary’s, Hawaii or BYU that have always prioritized overseas recruiting, the changes wrought by revenue-sharing have come as a bit of a shock to the system. When Chris Holtmann took the job at DePaul last year, he made recruiting international players a focus of his strategy to rebuild the program and compete in the Big East, even sending an assistant coach overseas to scout and recruit during the summer.
It wasn’t something he had done at Ohio State or Butler or Gardner-Webb — “I doubt I could have gotten any international players to Boiling Springs,” Holtmann quipped — but leaning heavily on the cosmopolitan breadth of Chicago, where any player from anywhere would be an L ride away from a restaurant and grocery that reminds them of home, only made sense.
And then, after his first season, when he was ready to dive deeply into the overseas talent pool, he found everyone else in college basketball diving in headfirst as well, brandishing giant fistfuls of cash.
“You had this idea going into it, we’re going to be one of a handful of schools that was going to recruit internationally,” Holtmann said. “And then everybody was recruiting internationally. What’s going on here? … We did see a much more competitive market than maybe I anticipated when I took the job and said, ‘This is what we’re going to do.’”
The Blue Demons will have five international players on their roster this year, but only one freshman, signed out of Spain in September, and he’s redshirting this season.
The overseas pipeline is open
It’s not going to be like this forever. The way the NCAA system changed so suddenly after the House settlement, especially after visa restrictions had prevented international players from taking advantage of their NIL, college programs were essentially recruiting three or four classes of overseas freshmen at once. The influx of 22-year-old European freshmen like Bogavac taking advantage of their first opportunity to play college ball — and get paid for it — essentially came out of nowhere.
That won’t happen again. The Great European Player Rush was a one-summer deal, and this season will have a lot to say about who struck gold. But House changed the landscape forever. There will be more overseas players than ever before interested in getting paid to play college basketball, including potential NBA draft picks who would have previously been happy to remain with their professional clubs.
Turns out, college basketball has worldwide appeal, and if you give players the opportunity, they’ll take advantage of it. Now schools have to figure out how to take advantage as well.
“Going forward, it’s a new wave, man,” Scheyer said. “Everybody’s going to be looking at it. Seeing how it all translates will be interesting. I think there’s an adjustment period, but the level of competition, the experience, there’s no question that’s valuable.”
The pipeline is open now. It may not be like this again, but it is not going to close.
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