Rice Owls introduce American football to new international students

STORY/VIDEO/PHOTO PITCH

David Ruth
713-348-6327
david@rice.edu

Rice Owls introduce American football to new international students

HOUSTON – (Aug. 24, 2016) – The Rice Owls held their annual football clinic for incoming international students, scholars and families Aug. 20 at Rice Stadium.

The event, which lasted about three hours, started with a tailgate for the students with players and staff serving up food and playing games. The group then moved indoors to the new Brian Patterson Sports Performance Center, located at the north end zone of Rice Stadium, where the students learned about basic rules and key plays and heard from head football coach David Bailiff and the offensive and defensive coaches, who also did some walkthrough examples with volunteers. It was then time to hit the Rice Stadium field. Bailiff, his staff and players put the students into groups and ran fun football drills. A video and photos from the event are below.

The event launched in 2010 and was believed to be the first of its kind at the time. Adria Baker, associate vice provost for international education and executive director of Rice’s Office of International Students and Scholars, said the brainchild for the event was Bailiff. “He’s the heartbeat of this,” she said. “It’s the generosity on their (football program’s) part; it’s the generosity of their spirit and their time.”

Classes at Rice began this week and the fall 2016 enrollment is not yet available, but last year international students made up approximately 12 percent of the undergraduate class at Rice, and 40 percent of Rice’s graduate student body was from outside the United States.

Overall, last year students came to Rice from 93 different countries or regions.

For more information or to obtain high-resolution video or photo files, contact David Ruth, director of national media relations at Rice, at david@rice.edu or 713-348-6327; or, Chuck Pool, assistant athletics director in athletics communications, at cpool@rice.edu or 713-348-5775.

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Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,910 undergraduates and 2,809 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for best quality of life and for lots of race/class interaction by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. To read “What they’re saying about Rice,” go to http://tinyurl.com/RiceUniversityoverview.