Is the Transfer Portal a Problem for College Track and Field?
College track and field is back and that means we are weeks away from crowning a brand new national champion. However, the sport is actually so predictable that we might as well be watching a Fast and Furious movie. The Florida Gators men won a national championship in 2023, for the sixth time in the past eleven years! The women’s side isn’t much better, because the Lady Longhorns of Texas won the outdoor title in 2023, their first since 2005. But they had been the runner up twice in the past decade before that. In many ways track and field already had a problem, where the best schools sucked up all the talent! It’s the reason why Sha’carri Richardson, Aleia Hobbs, and Mikiah Brisco all won NCAA championships for LSU in three consecutive years back to back to back. But the transfer portal has taken a college track and field world, that was already imbalanced and ruined it, not just for the little guys, but for everyone.
The truth is that the transfer portal is here, and it’s likely not going anywhere. But whenever 1 rule changes it’s almost done with somebody specific in mind, and everyone else will simply have to deal with the consequences. So no matter who you are, what college you compete for, or even what Division you are in, the transfer portal will affect you. It probably won’t be in a good way. Because no athlete, and no team is safe, and this is why.
Why was the transfer portal created?
The transfer portal really had nothing to do with track and field when it was created. Right now D’ondre Swint is the NCAA leader in the 60 meter dash for Texas Tech. Favour Ashe is second for Auburn. Jalen Drayden is fifth once again for Texas Tech. All of them are transfers from somewhere else in D1! And it is not just the men. On the women’s side Alyssa Colbert is second in all of D1 in the 60 meter dash, Semira Killebrew and Jasmine Montgomery are both inside the top 10, and they are transfers as well! They all left one D1 program to go to another, and half of them did it within the same conference. But Dario Matau was a 100 meter dash finalist in NCAA D2 in 2023, and he now runs for Auburn in the SEC! These are just some of the facts for you to consider.
The transfer portal was invented for one real reason. It was for high level Division 1 FBS football. Getting on the field as a freshman is really hard to do when a team has 85 full ride scholarships, and only 11 men on the field at a time. So many athletes ended up redshirting because they weren’t going to play anyway, and then using a “grad transfer” year where their fourth year on campus was really an audition for them to play the last year of their career somewhere else. If you throw in some medical redshirts, and the need for college coaches to revamp a program overnight, because winning and all the college football money that comes with it, depends on it… Then you get the perfect storm that created a desire for the transfer portal. That is the real reason why everyone at that level was on board with making the shift to the portal.
What the portal did is it let coaches come into any program and turn over the roster immediately. Players after the fall season ends can simply “enter the portal” and shop for a new scholarship without having to sit out a redshirt season. They can even end up on campus in time for spring practice at another school if it all goes off without a hitch. That doesn’t happen anywhere near as often as you might think. But we saw this with Deion Sanders and Colorado this year, where practically half the team changed, and for a moment it looked like they had what it took to win a national title immediately. To clarify, nothing that was just described has anything to do with how success for a college track team actually works, which brings us to a whole bunch of problems.
What transferring looks like in college track and field
College track and field is incredibly predictable but not because the coaches for all the other schools don’t care about winning. It’s because track and field unlike football in the FBS doesn’t have 85 scholarships to give out to everyone. Not 1 team in FBS doesn’t plan on using all 85 of those scholarships. In track and field, you only get 12.6 scholarships for the men, and 18 for the women. But any legitimate team will have at least 40 men’s or women’s roster alone. It’s simple math, they aren’t all going to get full-rides. Beyond that many D1 teams don’t use all of the scholarships anyway, they might spend half of the 18 for their women’s team and call it a season on spending. A college track coach is at the mercy of however much money the school is willing to spend on scholarships. Simply put you get what you get and you don’t get upset. You just make it work with whatever they give you. So the few coaches who actually get all 12.6 or 18 to spend, had better use it to win or else!
If you’re wondering how that is a problem for the athletes, well here is the truth without photoshop. When I was an NCAA head coach I attended a coaching certification course with other coaches from all across the nation. One of the instructors was a big time coach in the SEC. He said flat out, that at his level there are certain meets that his team has to do really well at in order for him to keep his job. So with all the money his school spends on track that most coaches don’t have, losing is not an option literally! That’s why the teams with the most scholarship money look to keep all the top athletes for themselves.
Big time coaches cannot afford to focus most of their time on developing talent because they have to win the meets to keep their jobs. The goal is to find the athletes who give you the best chance to win and get them on the track as soon as possible. If at any moment someone else proves to be a better option, you put them on the track instead. It’s hard to run big PRs if you aren’t on the track to run races in the first place. I am not saying that big time coaches don’t actually coach. What I’m saying is that for many coaches making you better in the long run as an athlete is nowhere near as high on their priority list compared to winning the meets they have to go to right now.
The transfer portal means that at any given moment a coach can basically pull the plug on an athlete they already recruited, and go find someone else to take their place. Simply put coaches are not committed to you anymore, because they don’t have to be. In fact, some of them now cannot afford to be. If you are winning the races that’s fine because you are the horse they are going to get behind. But if you start losing, and the coach is feeling the pressure, they can strongly motivate you to hit the portal, and just give your scholarship to someone else. Some coaches might even just take the scholarship back at the end of the season, which is pretty controversial amongst coaches on whether that’s ok to do, but that is the honest truth.
Transferring in track and field is a scholarship risk
Track and field is a hard sport to get any scholarship money. So if you walk away from it, there’s no guarantee you are getting any where you are headed. You enter the portal without a promise that you are getting picked up. If you are the NAIA national champion in the 200 meter like Zayquan Lincoln, then yes somebody will give you a full-ride. But that’s not most recruits. In fact some transfers end up out of college entirely with nobody to run for.
I totally understand why an athlete would want to transfer from a small conference program to a larger one in D1. You go from a school with limited track and field resources, to one with better facilities, better travel accommodations, basically better everything. But the portal can jack things up for all those athletes too. Consider that up until recently athletes for the most part didn’t transfer from the school they committed to. If you are a coach in a small conference for D1 that actually gets good at track, you basically have to do it by looking for all the 2 and 3 star recruits that the big schools didn’t want in the first place. You find those diamonds in the rough, get them to commit, and coach them up over the next few years to win conference championships, and qualify for NCAA championships. But now the portal says that when the athlete actually gets good enough to win anything at the NCAA level, they can become a free agent for all the schools who never wanted them to begin with.
Put yourself in the coaches shoes, “why should I give all my energy to making you better if you are likely going to abandon me and my program at the first chance that you get?” All the other college coaches now have no real incentive to coach all the 2 and 3 star recruits up, because if the athlete gets “too good” you end up with no athlete at all. Arguably most 2 and 3 star recruits can probably run with those who are 4 and 5 star level if they had good coaching. I was a low 2 star level recruit who was running like a 3 star level sprinter by my sophomore year of college. You just have to stick with that good coach, the one who actually wanted you on the team when others ignored you long enough, and put in the work. When you ditch the team and the coach that helped you improve, it should at least be a thought that the people who didn’t want you before, might not even appreciate you that much now that they let you get on the team.
The Bottom Line
Increased athlete mobility is not always a bad thing. But be careful what you wish for. Zayquan Lincoln won the NAIA 200 meter dash at Indiana Tech University. After that moment he transferred up to D1 at South Florida in the American conference for the 2023 season. He has never made a D1 championship since, at least not yet. He actually hasn’t won a medal in that conference indoors or outdoors. He hasn’t even run PRs in any of his events in a full season in D1. The coaches who believed in him originally, I’m sure had big plans for him. And he chose to leave for a team that likely wasn’t serious about him before he had success in NAIA. The transfer portal is a thing, and it can be a great benefit to change teams, and change colleges. But here is my advice. Think long and hard before you choose to transfer to any school. Because there is a reason why those coaches didn’t want you before. And the fact that they care more now, doesn’t mean they will care anywhere near as much as the coach who believed in you all along.
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