Little Elm quarterback Sashwath Suriya played in the Lobos' 42-21 win over Mansfield Legacy.
Suriya's big night came in a 42-21 win detailed by Dallas News, which reported he completed 6 of 8 passes for 107 yards and a touchdown while adding 22 rushing yards and a score on the ground. He also connected with Steven Harper on a 73-yard touchdown strike during the Friday win, per the same account.
Plano East Kicker Arad Teflanab
Arad Teflanab is part of Plano East football.
On Plano East's sideline, players wear American flag stickers on their helmets, with some also displaying their family's country-of-origin flag.
The Numbers Behind the Shift
The Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metro area added 44,437 Asian American residents between 2022 and 2023, the largest numerical increase of any metro area in the country, pushing the region's Asian American population to 692,382, according to The Texas Tribune.
Denton County, where Little Elm is located, was estimated to be 10.5% Asian in 2022, up from 6.6% in 2010, while neighboring Collin County was estimated at 17.5% Asian that year, up from 11.3% a decade earlier, according to Axios Dallas. The same outlet noted North Texas has the largest Korean population in the state along with sizable South Asian and Vietnamese communities.
Still a Rarity at the College Level
Despite that local growth, Asian American representation in college football remains rare nationally. In 2016, just 115 athletes of Asian descent played NCAA Division I football out of 28,141 total players, or about 0.4% of all athletes, according to AMAZN HQ, even though Asian Americans made up 5.8% of the overall U.S. population that year. The same report found Asian athletes represented only 1.4% of the total Division I student-athlete population, a sharp contrast to sports like tennis, where they made up 5.5% of Division I athletes, and fencing, where Asian American men made up 15.8% of the population.
Pranav Iyer, founder and CEO of AMAZN HQ, a platform highlighting Asian Americans in sports, played defensive back at Division III Chapman University. Iyer has said Texas's youth sports culture and multigenerational South Asian American families are helping make football a bigger factor in the region than elsewhere. Shehan Jeyarajah, a second-generation Sri Lankan American who works as a CBS Sports journalist and serves as president of the Football Writers Association of America, has said young athletes today see far more involvement in sports from friends, family and community than they did 20 or 30 years ago. Jeyarajah has traced his own connection to football back to watching Super Bowl XLI at his grandparents' assisted-living community in 2007.
Growth Alongside Resistance
North Texas politics saw a controversy this fall. Bo French, the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner, posted a message on September 13 criticizing a group of predominantly South Asian University of Texas students after the football team beat Ohio State, drawing backlash from both sides of the political aisle, including criticism from Senator John Cornyn and from Jon Rosenthal, French's opponent in the upcoming election.
The episode followed separate remarks from Ron Vilaheuer, who compared Indian immigrants to rats, according to the Dallas Morning News. Such incidents arrive against a broader backdrop: a Stop AAPI Hate survey conducted this year found that almost half of Asian American Pacific Islanders surveyed reported experiencing a hate act in 2025. At the same time, youth sports participation among Asian Americans has been climbing, with a Project Play study reporting a 25% rise over five years, the largest increase of any racial or ethnic group, by nearly 20 percentage points.
