How Many UTRGV Student-Athletes Are Actually From The Valley?

UTRGV Football’s first-ever recruiting class became official as this year’s National Signing Day kicked off yesterday. By the day’s end, UTRGV signed a total of 51 student-athletes to be a part of their inaugural season, 10 of which had already signed their letter of intent during the early signing period in December.

Here is a look at UTRGV’s current roster.

If you’ll notice, there are only 7 players on their roster from the Rio Grande Valley, or, approximately 13.7%. Although many might tell you that the Valley should be grateful to have 7 players signed onto ANY roster, signing only 7 players from the area sure feels like a far cry from what UTRGV Head Coach Travis Bush alluded to back when he was first hired. Also, consider that schools such as UTEP and UTSA both have rosters with a significantly higher local student-athlete percentage with 20.4% and 17.6% respectively.

But after pausing to look at this roster and spurring from having literally nothing better to do, I decided to take a deeper dive into UTRGV’s athletics program as a whole to see just how much representation is UTRGV providing for local student-athletes.

Here’s what I found:

Men’s UTRGV Athletics

Sport – # of RGV Athletes / # of Total Athletes = % of RGV Athletes

Football – 7 / 51 = 13.7%

Baseball – 7 / 44 = 15.9%

Basketball – 0 / 16 = 0%

Cross Country – 6 / 10 = 60%

Golf – 1 / 10 = 10%

Soccer – 3 / 28 = 10.7%

Tennis – 1 / 8 = 12.5%

Track and Field – 11 / 30 = 36.6%

Total Men’s Athletics –  36 / 197 = 18.2%

Women’s UTRGV Athletics

Sport – # of RGV Athletes / # of Total Athletes = % of RGV Athletes

Basketball – 0 / 15 = 0%

Cross Country – 5 / 7 = 71.4%

Golf – 1 / 9 = 11.1%

Tennis – 1 / 7 = 14.2%

Cross Country 12 / 38 = 31.5%

Soccer – 2 / 23 = 8.6%

Volleyball – 3 / 13 = 23%

Total Women’s Athletics –  24 / 112 = 21.4%

Total UTRGV Athletics – 60 / 309 = 19.4%

A few observations:

• Incredibly, despite being on the of better high school soccer regions in the state, UTRGV men’s soccer fields only 3 on their entire roster.
• The sport with the highest RGV representation is Women’s Cross Country with a whopping 71.4% of the roster being made up of local student-athletes. Men’s cross country comes in 2nd with 60% of the roster calling the RGV home.
• Basketball RGV representation is entirely non-existent for both men’s and women’s athletics.

In all, about 1 out of every 5 student-athletes hails from the Valley, which is surprisingly higher than I thought it would be.

But, honestly, 7 recruits is still peanuts compared to where UTRGV football should be, and there’s no reason for the men’s soccer team to have less than 5 on their squad. Also, having zero basketball recruits in either men’s or women’s is absolutely abysmal.

I can already hear people in my comments, crying “BUT iF wE WAnT To WiN, WeEE NEED To RECrUit OutSIDE of The VAlleY!!!!”

Oh, my brothers and sisters in Christ; UTRGV’s athletics programs are already losing and the football team is probably gonna go winless its first year, anyway, so, what the fuck is the difference?