How colleges in the United States are heavily represented at the Latin America Amateur Championship

LA ROMANA, Dominican Republic — For Arkansas assistant golf coach Barrett Lais, the initial recruiting pitch to try to get players from outside the United States to come to Fayetteville often begins with having to deal with a familiar remark.

“A lot of people from Latin America said, ‘We’ve never heard of Arkansas,'” Lais said. “That was the difficult part because we’re in the middle of the country. Our weather isn’t unbelievable, we have all four seasons. So, how do we go down there and recruit them and sell them on this?”

Lais and head coach Brad McMakin realized quickly that there were things they needed to do to counter their location. And they noticed that there was a trickle-down effect, too. Get one player from a Latin American country and another might come. Win and a few more might follow. What began with Luis Garza, Alvaro Ortiz, and even back as far as Nicolas Echaverria in 2012, is paying dividends now.

How to watch the Latin America Amateur Championship on ESPN

“For me, [Garza, Ortiz and Echaverria] pushed me to go to Arkansas, and we’re such good friends that I trusted them,” said Peru’s Julian Perico, the No. 2 player in South America. “So I went there and brought the rest with me.”

The result has been a continued flow of Latin American players to Arkansas, including No. 43 in the world, Mateo Fernandez de Oliveira, and five of the top 25 players in South America — all of whom will be playing at this year’s Latin American Amateur Championship, which begins Thursday at Casa de Campo (11 a.m. ET, ESPN2). The winner of the event earns a spot in the Masters, as well as The Open and the U.S. Amateur.

From Arkansas to North Texas to schools across the country, the pipelines for golf between Latin American countries and colleges in…