By Korey Schroeder, Associate Head Women’s Volleyball Coach, Green Bay

With an average of six or more players being added to the transfer portal every day, it can be tough for coaches to keep up. We are seeing transfers commit to their new schools daily, and it’s clear this is the new normal.

As easy as the transfer portal may seem for players to enter, and for coaches to use, it’s important to remember there are rules involved with the process. Here are a few of the big ones, along with some other notes on the transfer portal:

1. Let’s start with impermissible contact and tampering. Contacting a student-athlete at another institution before they are on the transfer portal is impermissible, even if you have a prior relationship or believe they intend to transfer. The NCAA has the discretion to decide if each case is an impermissible contact or tampering based on the severity of the situation.
2. As a coach, it’s your responsibility to confirm a player is in the portal before you contact them. If someone writes saying they are transferring, check the portal before responding.
3. This will be the first year May 1 is the deadline for student-athletes to enter the transfer portal. If a student-athlete goes on the portal after that date and ends up transferring to another institution, they will have to sit out a year.
4. This is more informational, but there have been 924 entries into the portal in NCAA Division I from the start of the 2021 season to March 2022. That is an average of nearly three transfers per DI institution. Of those on the portal, over a third (357) are graduate transfers.

Even though the landscape of transferring has changed rapidly, it is necessary for coaches and student-athletes to be educated on the rules and processes that go along with it.