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Ball State international athletes adjust to life in Muncie

Muncie, Ind., is hardly exotic.

In the 1920s, it was considered so average that the Middletown studies used it as an example of a typical small American city.

For Ball State’s 19 international athletes, however, Middletown U.S.A. is ripe with new experiences, culture and — in some cases — language, all while dealing with stereotypes and homesickness.

Even the weather, senior volleyball player Hiago Garchet said, can take some getting used to.

Garchet transferred to Ball State from Park University in Missouri, but he’s originally from Belo Horizante, Brazil.

“I thought I knew what cold was, and I really didn’t. My first experience was my first winter at Park in Kansas City, which is pretty close to here,” he said before extending his arms. “It’s still a little colder here, but waking up one day and seeing this much — how many inches is this, like 20 inches, 30 inches of snow? I don’t even know — it was crazy.”

Most Ball State students probably don’t consider Kansas City close, but about 5,000 miles separate Muncie and Garchet’s hometown.

Still, Garchet said, it’s all just part of the deal.

“You’ve gotta deal with it, live with it,” he said. “I knew it was gonna get cold at some point [but] I came here for a bigger purpose. … I came here with a goal in mind, and I’m almost there.”


Story continues after the map.


Scholarships

Brazilian universities do not field athletic teams, so Garchet had a decision to make after high school.

“It was either taking a break from school and trying to pursue my professional career or going to school,” he said. “And I wanted to do both because I think I’m a great player, but I wanted to have the academic on my side too.”

In Australia, universities have athletic teams but don’t offer scholarships to the same extent as their American counterparts.

Anya Eicher, a freshman on the Ball State field hockey team from Boort, Australia, said the system is not as intense as the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

“Getting the opportunity to really refine my hockey skills and then get an education at the same time while exploring a new country — that was really what got me,” she said.

Eicher found Ball State through a scouting service called NSR Australia.

Services like NSR Australia send scouting reports and video to American colleges and universities, but the schools and coaches still need to close the deal the old-fashioned way with phone calls and a sales pitch.

Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) is Canada’s equivalent to the NCAA. The CIS allows schools to offer scholarships but does not sponsor women’s golf.

Ball State golfers Meghan McDougall, a senior, and Kelsey Sear, a junior, attended Bill Crothers Secondary School in Markham, Ontario, together. Sear said the pair came to the United States because they had more chances to advance their athletic careers.

Culture Shock

College sports, McDougall said, are really just a U.S. phenomenon compared with sports in Canada.

“It’s just a different atmosphere,” she said. “In Ontario, we have university athletics but there’s no real hype around them. Like people don’t go to the football games like they go to the football games here.”

The numbers back it up. Ball State, for example, had the second-lowest average attendance in the NCAA’s Football Bowl Subdivision in 2015 with 7,974 — but that would have been the second-highest average among CIS football programs in 2015, behind only Quebec City’s Université Laval (13,109).

Sear said she was initially surprised by the pride from Ball State graduates at Cardinal athletic events.

“I remember freshman year, I thought it was so weird this whole alumni thing and how people are so stoked they graduated here whatever years ago because it’s not like that in Canada,” she said.

McDougall said Homecoming is a prime example of the differences between Canadian and American schools.

“[Homecoming] exists [in Canada], but it’s more for the student body,” she said. “Alum don’t go, and it doesn’t have the same sense of community as it does here.”

Sports in Brazil are also “very low-key,” Garchet said, so he played for a club volleyball team instead of a high school squad.

Garchet said language was also a barrier when he came to the United States. Though he studied two foreign languages in Brazil — English and Spanish — he has learned more conversational English since coming to the U.S. Still, he said his jokes sometimes get lost in translation.

“It is [difficult] sometimes when it comes to jokes and stuff, like we have a different sense of humor,” he said. “I make my jokes and they’re not really funny here, but I think they’re great. It’s just the language and what your language allows you to do.”

Garchet’s friends in the United States helped him transition from speaking Portuguese every day to English.

“My English, I wasn’t fluent when I came here,” he said. “I had a good basic understanding — you know, I struggled the first couple months — but I always lived with American roommates, and I was fortunate to have people who never hesitated to help me out. They always corrected me when I needed it.”

Learning fluent English, however, was easier for some than others. Senior women’s basketball player Nathalie Fontaine, from Stockholm, Sweden, said she had more exposure to English than some might think.

“TV shows y’all have over here, we have most of them back home too, and they’re in English, and then we learn English from first grade,” she said. “So I was kind of used to it, but obviously being here my English improved a lot. I think being in the States and being around people who only speak English forced me to develop it that much more than before I got here.”

Academics

On top of learning the nuances of a different language, Fontaine had to adapt to a new style of schooling. She said it was one of the biggest changes when she arrived at Ball State.

“It was a lot different — I’d never taken a multiple choice exam or like true or false before I got here,” she said. “All of the questions on the exams back home would be like short answer questions or full essay questions. [On] exams, you’d have to write 10 pages of paper on your own, without any books or anything.”

Foreign countries also have different admission requirements for their universities.

Eicher said her transition only required a couple of “extra steps” she wouldn’t have needed to stay in Australia, like taking the SAT. She also said she needed to have her transcripts translated into an approximate grade point average because Australian schools use a different system.

As with Australia and Sweden, McDougall said standardized testing is not as widespread in Canada as it is in the United States.

“Taking the SAT was a shock,” she said. “Four hours of test was a lot to handle.”

Sear said Canadian schools don’t use the GPA system either. Instead, they calculate an average percentage for all the classes combined, where an 80 is roughly equivalent to an A.

Canadian students also have to take an extra step. Ninth grade is usually not included in their high school transcripts, so they have to include middle school grades with their high school transcript because of NCAA eligibility rules.

Canadian universities, McDougall said, generally only look at transcripts from the 11th and 12th grades.

“Those are the only grades that matter, all the other ones are like a build-up,” she said. “Whereas [in the U.S.], if you failed a class in freshman year, it affects you like the rest of your high school career.”

Stereotypes

Though their love for Tim Hortons and hockey rings true, McDougall said, many Americans don’t realize that different parts of Canada — like different regions within the U.S. — have different accents.

“As soon as they find out we’re Canadian,” she said, “it’s like, ‘Eh? Can you say about for me?’”

Canadian isn’t the only accent some Americans try to mimic. Eicher said the assumptions are good-natured for the most part, but still wrong.

“A lot of people on the team have actually tried to master the Australian accent, and it always ends up British,” she said. “I’ve told them 100 times, it’s not quite there and they just think British is Australian.”

In part because of their softer Ontario accent, McDougall said, sometimes people don’t realize she’s Canadian at first.

“[Sear] and I often get mistaken for being American, especially when we go into the international office,” she said. “They go ‘Oh, are you looking for study abroad opportunities?’ No, we need you to sign our I-20.”

Fontaine’s nationality is also questioned sometimes, but she said understands. She doesn’t look like the American expectation of Swedes.

“Americans probably have a stereotype that a Swedish person would be white, blonde, blue-eyed,” she said. “So when I said I was Swedish, they wouldn’t really believe it at first because I’m none of them.”

Home Sweet Home

To hear her parents’ Australian accents, Eicher said she has to plan around the 14- to 16-hour time difference (it varies because daylight saving time in the southern hemisphere runs opposite from the northern hemisphere) between Muncie and Australia.

“You have to really schedule out time to do it,” she said. “With messages and stuff, we send e-mails. You might reply to them in two days’ time or something like that, but we manage to keep in touch.”

Belo Horizante, Brazil, is three hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time, and when daylight saving switches in both countries it will only be one hour ahead. Garchet said he doesn’t have much trouble keeping in touch with his family.

“It’s not bad, it’s not bad at all,” he said. “Thank God we’re right here right now as opposed to like, 50 years ago, because that would be very hard. I Skype my parents every two or three days, tell them what’s going on.”

But he doesn’t always stick to the schedule.

“Sometimes when I go a week without calling them, my mom gets really upset,” he said.

Garchet said he hopes to continue his volleyball career as a professional, preferably in Europe, when he graduates so he can continue to learn more about new places and cultures.

It’s been a learning experience, but he said he’s enjoyed his time in the United States — even if he has to deal with heavy snow every now and then.

“It was the best choice I really made in my life,” he said. “I think a lot of my friends are missing out on not doing that.”

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