A few months ago, we wrote this.
This past week, a journalist named Talia Goodman, writing for the basketball site On3.com, reported that approximately 1,300 women’s basketball players — about 25 percent of the entire pool of players in NCAA Division I — had put their names into the transfer portal.
Read that again. TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT.
The number of players currently seeking other teams in Division I women’s basketball would fill 90 rosters of Division I teams. It’s a proportion that’s hard to quantify, given the number of teams currently playing in the scholarship level of college basketball.
We’ve written on the subject of the portal before, and how a number of prominent people in the collegiate sports universe have started seeing how the portal has given some disgruntled players hope of a second chance.
But also, there’s the fact that a significant portion of athletes in the transfer portal are never contacted by any college. And a significant number leave their sport altogether.
This should put a lot of people who are in charge of sport in this country on notice. Each of the players in the portal have put in time and energy into improving themselves at a particular field of endeavor. Many have had parents spend large sums of money for training, travel teams, and going to 6 a.m. tournaments.
And yet, you have 25 percent of basketball players who are ready to walk away from their team because of playing time, coaching, or the promised riches of name, likeness, and image (NLI) deals.
I have a feeling you are going to see a lot of college teams in the future who will not have the requisite number of players available — kind of what you saw earlier this year when Texas Christian had to hold tryouts in midseason to fill out its women’s basketball roster, or when the Rutgers field hockey team had to play a game against Temple a few years ago with 12 outfielders because of the Knights’ lone goalkeeper was in concussion protocol.
While these examples were because of injury, the transfer portal and the disgruntled athletes without a backup plan are going to leave a trail of unfulfilled athletic dreams, and, quite possibly, people who aren’t going to be able to leave college with a degree.
Which should be the goal in the first place.