Every year, young athletes leave home to attend college thousands of miles away, often in a new city or country where they know almost no one. They arrive with years of experience in their sport and a place on a college roster, so at least one part of their new life already feels a little familiar. Everything outside the sport (classes, friendships, paperwork, money, and simply learning how to live somewhere new) can take much longer to settle into.
Islam Elfiky moved from Cairo to Washington, D.C., where he played Division I squash at The George Washington University and eventually held the No. 1 spot on the men’s ladder. By the time he arrived, he’d been playing squash for years, represented Egypt at the junior level, and reached a world ranking of 165. He knew how to train, compete, lose a match, and come back ready for the next one.
College brought a different set of adjustments. Elfiky had a new academic system to learn, a new city and culture to adjust to, visa requirements to manage, and a family several time zones away. None of those things had much to do with squash, but they were suddenly part of what it took to succeed as an athlete.
The team can provide structure. There were practices to attend, teammates to meet, matches on the calendar, and coaches expecting him to show up. Outside of that schedule, though, he still had to build a life in a place that didn’t yet feel like home. As Elfiky has written about moving to and adjusting to life in another country, that process doesn’t happen all at once. Often, the sport that brought an international athlete to the United States is the part they already understand. Learning to live there takes time.
The Recruiting Process Can Be Complicated From the Start
For an athlete growing up in the United States, the college recruiting process can come with a built-in network of people who understand how it works. Coaches may already have relationships with college programs. Parents can visit campuses. Teammates who graduated a year or two earlier may have gone through the same process.
Coming from another country can make those decisions harder to navigate.
Recruiting may happen largely through email, video, tournament results, and conversations with coaches thousands of miles away. An athlete may be trying to compare schools they’ve never visited while also dealing with standardized tests, transcript requirements, financial questions, and the paperwork involved in studying in the United States.
For squash players coming from Egypt, there’s another interesting wrinkle. Egypt has one of the world’s deepest competitive squash cultures, so players can arrive in the United States having already competed at an extremely high level.
Elfiky was one of them. Before coming to George Washington, he’d been part of Egypt’s national junior program and reached a world ranking of 165. GW expected him to play at the top of its lineup when he joined, and that’s exactly where he ended up.
The athletic question, then, wasn’t whether he could play at a high level. He did. The larger adjustment was figuring out how that experience fit into college life in the United States.
The First Semester Isn’t Just About Classes
Starting college comes with plenty of small tasks that barely register once a student has done them for a few years. Finding the right building. Understanding how a professor runs a class. Figuring out where to buy groceries, how to open a bank account, or what to do over a holiday when most friends are going home.
For an international student, many of those things are happening at once.
Academically, even familiar subjects can feel different when they’re being taught in a new system. Expectations around class participation, essays, group projects, office hours, and relationships with professors may not match what a student encountered at home.
Money can require more planning, too. International students face restrictions on where and how much they can work while studying in the United States, which makes scholarships, family support, and careful budgeting especially important.
Then there’s the distance itself. Cairo isn’t a place Elfiky could casually return to for a long weekend. Missing home can be manageable when classes, practices, and matches keep the week full. Breaks and holidays can feel very different when that schedule suddenly disappears.
Having a team helps. It gives an athlete people to see every day and something familiar to organize life around. But being comfortable on a squash court doesn’t automatically make the rest of a new country feel familiar.
Success on the Court Doesn’t Eliminate the Adjustment
Elfiky’s college record makes his transition look fairly seamless from the outside.
During the 2011-12 season, he went 21-3 from the top position on George Washington’s ladder. He won 19 in straight sets and finished the season on a 15-match winning streak. GW named him the men’s squash team’s MVP and Male Athlete of the Year at its inaugural Georgey Awards.
He’d already established himself at the top of the lineup the previous season, recording 18 wins against only two losses and finishing ranked 34th nationally by the College Squash Association.
Those numbers tell one part of the story. They don’t show everything that happened around them.
A college athlete still has papers due after a difficult match. Training still has to fit around exams. Travel weekends don’t make assignments disappear. For an international athlete, calls home may also have to happen around a large time difference, and questions about visas and life after graduation sit in the background alongside the ordinary concerns every college student has.
Doing well in that environment means finding a routine that makes all of those pieces manageable. Elfiky clearly found one. His performance helped George Washington’s squash program during a period when the team itself was climbing nationally, and he remained a fixture at the top of its lineup.
What Stays With You After College Sports End
One of the stranger parts of being a college athlete is how quickly something that has organized your life for years can end.
For most athletes, no other competitive season waits after graduation. The practices, matches, coaches, and teammates that dictated the week’s rhythm suddenly aren’t there anymore.
For international students, graduation can bring another round of uncertainty. Staying in the United States may involve employment authorization, visa decisions, graduate school, or another move. The life they spent four years building is changing just as they’ve finally become comfortable in it.
Many of the habits developed along the way carry forward.
An athlete who moved across the world for college has already had some experience being the new person in the room. They’ve had to build relationships with people whose backgrounds may be very different from their own, learn unfamiliar systems without knowing every rule in advance, and keep functioning while they’re still figuring things out.
Elfiky’s career after college took him into environments where those skills remained useful.
His first venture stayed close to the sport he knew well. He co-founded a high-end squash facility in Washington, D.C., that opened to the public in 2017. Later, he moved into healthcare technology with MedsNow, a New York company designed to help independent pharmacies sell online while navigating the industry’s compliance and regulatory requirements.
The ventures Elfiky pursued after college took him well beyond competitive squash, but building something in unfamiliar territory wasn’t entirely new.
He’d already done something like that when he moved from Cairo to Washington.
What International Athletes Should Ask Before Making the Move
For a young athlete considering an American college offer, the athletic program’s quality matters. It just shouldn’t be the only thing that matters.
The school itself has to make sense. Playing time can change quickly, coaches leave, and injuries happen. An athlete should be able to imagine wanting to attend the university even if the athletic experience doesn’t unfold exactly as planned.
It’s also worth asking specific questions about how the program supports international students. Are there other international athletes on the roster? Who helps with visa questions? What do students usually do during longer breaks? How easy is it to stay on campus when most domestic students leave?
Those answers can reveal quite a bit about how prepared a program is for the realities of bringing someone thousands of miles from home.
Building relationships outside the team matters, too. A roster provides an immediate social circle, which can be enormously helpful during the first semester. Over four years, though, college becomes a much richer experience when an athlete also knows people who have nothing to do with the sport.
And it’s worth thinking about graduation earlier than senior spring. International students who hope to remain in the United States after college have additional deadlines and decisions involving work authorization, employment, and potentially graduate school. Those questions are much easier to handle when they aren’t left until the final few months.
None of this means an athlete needs to map out the next four years before getting on the plane. Part of the experience is learning how to live with questions that don’t have immediate answers.
About Islam Elfiky
Islam Elfiky is a New York-based entrepreneur who grew up in Cairo, Egypt, and competed at a high level in squash before coming to the United States. He was part of Egypt’s national junior program, reached a world ranking of 165, and then joined George Washington’s Division I men’s squash team.
At George Washington, Elfiky competed at the top of the men’s ladder for the program. During his 21-3 season in 2011-12, he earned team MVP honors and was named the university’s Male Athlete of the Year at the inaugural Georgey Awards.
Since college, his work has moved through sports, healthcare technology, and entrepreneurship. His personal site shares more about Islam Elfiky and his path from Cairo to the United States. At the same time, his work in healthcare technology and entrepreneurship reflects where that path eventually took him.
Elfiky’s experience is his own, but the larger transition will be familiar to many international student-athletes. The sport gives them a reason to move and, at least initially, something familiar to hold onto when they arrive. The rest of college life slowly builds around it, one class, friendship, mistake, and new routine at a time.
