UMD men’s hockey coach Scott Sandelin held his season-ending press conference Monday at Amsoil Arena. About to embark on his 25th season as the Bulldogs’ bench boss, Sandelin spoke for nearly an hour Monday on a variety of topics, most of which we will cover in a more traditional 8 Thoughts later this week.
However, Sandelin was most passionate and most direct in talking about issues surrounding the NCAA transfer portal.
The portal became a thing back in 2018, a means of helping university compliance officers track transfers and better organize the process. Basically, a student athlete tells his/her school compliance officer to initiate the process, and their name will eventually appear in the portal, which is contained on a website that administrators and coaches have access to. Once the athlete’s name appears in the portal, other coaches can initiate contact.
On Sunday, UMD men’s hockey forwards Kyler Kleven and Luke Johnson put their names in the portal. UMD had already lost forward Blake Biondi to Notre Dame a few days after he put his name in the portal, a decision that was termed “mutual” between Biondi and the UMD staff.
However, you’ll be shocked to learn that there are pitfalls and abuses happening within the well-intentioned system.
Sandelin made it clear Monday. He is not opposed to the existence of the transfer portal. He instead is miffed at entities who are not using the portal as it was intended.
Specifically, the coach turned his attention to the “shady s**t” happening “behind the scenes” in college sports (not just hockey).
“There’s guys right now that are not even in the portal, that are already going places,” Sandelin said. “It’s asinine. I’m sorry, it’s asinine. It’s ridiculous. You know what? It’s there for a Luke Johnson, Kyler Kleven, they want to go explore opportunities. I get that right. Yeah, we can gain from it, but what’s going on in our world right now is absolutely asinine.
“I said it a long time ago and everyone gave me crap about it, not you guys, but I’m like, it’s asinine. Are we going to use it? Yeah, it’s there. You’re going to have to use it because you’re going to do it. Do I want to? Not particularly. We’ll use it accordingly and everyone’s going to do what they need to do. But the stuff that’s going on behind the scenes, phew. It’s not right.”
The portal isn’t supposed to be public. Of course, that hasn’t stopped reporters from finding ways to get to the names that appear in it. Multiple sites — including my friends at The Rink Live — have used their reporting chops to create a list of hockey players in the portal. This is fine, as reporters are literally reporting on something within their beat. It’s their job. But it may create some unrealistic expectations among fans as to the quality of players available. You see, just because a player’s name is in the portal doesn’t necessarily mean he/she is available for anyone.
“The perception is you can go and get anyone you want,” Sandelin said. “That’s not the reality. The reality is, is if you’re not a certain program or working with a certain agent, you’re not getting that person. I’ve got three guys (associate coach Adam Krause, along with assistants Cody Chupp and Brant Nicklin) in there that have been working their butts off trying to find out who might become available through agents. They’re doing their job and they’ve been working hard. It’s just ridiculous to me how this is going down. I’m not afraid to say it. I’m getting too old to sugar coat stuff. It’s changing our world. It’s like guerrilla warfare right now.”
Initially, I was the one who brought up the portal. UMD has lost three players to it, had already lost six seniors (fifth years Luke Loheit, Connor McMenamin, Quinn Olson, and Matthew Thiessen, along with fourth-year seniors Zach Stejskal and Darian Gotz), and has another player’s eligibility hanging in the balance (Cole Spicer). With only eight players signed as of now, it’s entirely possible that UMD could fill new holes with players who’ve been recruited for future years, yes, but it seems like the Bulldogs will also try to use the portal to fill those holes and I wanted to try to get some insight.
Sandelin initially said he didn’t want to get into it at the moment, but a question from Alexis Bass of Northern News Now — a former college athlete herself — about challenges of dealing with the portal was what finally got him going.
“So we are gonna get into it today? That’s good. All right.
“Biggest challenge? Um, I think there’s a lot of shady s**t going on. You want to be ethical. I just think there’s a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes. I’m not sitting here (solely) blaming agents. Kids know kids on different teams, there’s avenues, right? But when I’m hearing kids are not even in the portal and they’ve got a school in line. How does that happen? It’s crazy. It used to be like you kind of had a heads up so you were ready.
“Now it’s happening before they even get in there. Come on. I’m not sour grapes because we’re not getting them. It’s just crazy to me. It’s just crazy to me that that’s going on right now. And I’ve heard other stories, and I’m not going to get into them. It’s frustrating. You look at the world we’re in right now. The monsters have their kingdom that they live in, and they’re getting the best players. You go to women’s hockey. Now you worry about kids leaving your program because they’re being recruited to go to a different school.”
Sandelin’s press conference came a day after a transfer portal-related report sent your humble correspondent off the deep end. The great Mark Divver, a longtime college hockey reporter out east who has proven himself very plugged in, noted that Connecticut forward Matthew Wood — a 2023 first-round pick of Nashville — was going to enter the portal. Then Divver threaded a second post to that news nugget that noted three schools had emerged as favorites to pick him up, even though he wasn’t in the portal yet.
Hearing Minnesota is the favorite, with Wisconsin and North Dakota in the mix, too,
— Mark Divver (@MarkDivver) March 31, 2024
That led to my response via X.
So weird that there are already favorites when he isn’t even in the portal yet. 🤔 https://t.co/InSoBsdPXB
— Bruce Ciskie (@BruceCiskie) March 31, 2024
This issue has reared its ugly head in other sports. Just this past January, Boston College football coach Jeff Hafley resigned to take the defensive coordinator job with the Green Bay Packers. He cited the portal and NIL as problems he was tiring of dealing with in the college game.
“When I got the BC job, COVID hit,” Hafley said. “I got to know my team over Zoom. We had masks on in practice and that was way different than anything I’d never experienced. Then the next year the transfer portal came in, which was like, all right, now I have to recruit players, but I also have to keep the guys that are on my team from leaving. There’s no contracts, so you recruit a guy and develop a guy, and all of a sudden he can leave.
“And then came paying players, NIL, so it was a storm basically, since I got the head job, of things that kept getting thrown at you. But you do the best you can and you adapt. Certainly college football has changed and I do think that — I’m not going to get on a soapbox here today — but what I will say is I that do think there needs some things to change. It’s still a great game and there’s still great coaches, but it changed a lot since I started that job.”
“Do you think this is healthy for coaches?,” asked Sandelin. “I think it’s asinine. And you know what? I’m not the only coach up here in hockey or basketball or football that’s said this. You’re gonna see good coaches get out of the game because they’re tired of it. It’s all money driven. And the schools that have money are gonna continue to have that power.”
Sandelin’s frustrations are clear and obvious here. Again, the system itself isn’t the problem. It’s the behind-the-scenes work happening before players even enter the transfer portal. There are rules within the NCAA against tampering, but is there any accountability in the system?
“Right now, I don’t have a lot of faith in that,” Sandelin said. “I mean, it’s wide open. Are there any rules, right, with anything? You know, the multi-time transfer rule, right? That’s wide open right now. There’s all kinds of things that are on the table and I’m not the one to make a decision, but it’s a crazy world and you know what, there’s a lot of people, including you guys (assembled local media), that don’t really know what our world’s about. You hear it, but you don’t know what it’s about. And again, if that sounds like an excuse, it’s not an excuse, it’s reality. We’ll keep battling and doing the things and we’ll find the players that want to play here and we’ll find good players. I’m gonna be fine with that. And we’ll use the portal accordingly, right? How we wanna use it.”
Sandelin made it abundantly clear that he believes in the “recruit and develop” model, and he said he doesn’t believe that building a team through the transfer portal is the way to go. At least right now.
“I’ll continue to believe in it,” he said, “and we’ll plug holes (through the portal) if we have to.”
Always someone of high ethics, Sandelin said he wasn’t going to compromise those ethics in order to have a perceived better chance of winning big.
“We’re gonna stay with the way we do it,” he insisted. “We may never win another national championship and I can be okay with that. I want to recruit kids. I want to bring kids in here, want to work with them. I want them to have a great experience in Duluth. If we win, we win. If we don’t, we don’t, but they’re still gonna move on and have opportunities beyond college. We’ll get good players.”
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