The reward was Sunday’s WNIT game against Duquesne at Millett Hall, the RedHawks’ first postseason berth since 2019.
Yet, in the week leading up to the tournament game, Miami coach Glenn Box had felt a sense of loss in this season of rejuvenation.
“It’s just been a funky week,” he said quietly as he sat in his office after his depleted Miami team fell to the Dukes, 73-66. “It really hasn’t been fun.
“Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed our kids we had this week and our practices, but ... it’s just we’re having to navigate a landscape that’s vastly different than anything I’m accustomed to.
“And it’s not just us, it’s programs all across college basketball.”
March Madness has a new meaning this year.
In this scenario, Cinderella sticks her feet into the glass slippers, turns her back on the prince, gets into the carriage and rides off.
Miami played Sunday’s game minus four players: One who played little and told Box she had “other obligations” and three others who announced — or in the case of star player Enjulina Gonzalez who announced through her agent — that they were entering the transfer portal, which opened Monday, and would play elsewhere next season.
Enjulina’s younger sister, Ziul, who was a sharpshooting freshman guard taking a medical redshirt season to rehab from knee surgery last year in high school, is leaving, too.
The other player heading to the portal was junior guard Cori Lard, one of the team’s top players off the bench. She’d transferred in this season from Barton Community College in Kansas.
The departure of Enjulina Gonzalez — who had just come to Oxford last fall from Mercer University, where she’d been a freshman standout — was especially impactful Sunday.
A first team All-Mid-American Conference player this season, she led the team in scoring (16.9 ppg) and was second in rebounds, steals and assists. She was riding a string of 25 straight double-figure scoring games and had topped 20 points nine times.
Box stressed his reason for sharing his views wasn’t to “shame” any one player, but just to point out what college basketball has become and how he thinks it will drastically change everything from the NCAA Tournament to caliber of play during the season and even the viability of some mid and low-major schools trying to compete in the future.
The initial concept of the transfer portal added some necessary changes to help student athletes control their situations when they were in untenable or just unfulfilling situations.
But it’s turned college basketball into the Wild West.
In the past week, Wright State men lost its six top players to the transfer portal and there may be more departures.
Box said the Butler women’s s team, which won in the NIT on Sunday, had lost three of its key players in the same fashion his team did.
Last season the UD men’s team lost top players like Koby Brea, the nation’s most accurate three-point shooter, and veteran guard Kobe Elvis in the transfer portal.
Both of them played in the NCAA Tournament this season ― Brea with Kentucky; Elvis with Oklahoma — while the Flyers missed the Big Dance and ended up in the NIT, where they lost Saturday at Chattanooga.
Miami’s football team — which fared much better than many postseason teams — had seven players opt out of the Arizona Bowl to enter the transfer portal.
One ended up at Auburn, another at Minnesota ad two at Texas A&M, including second-team All-MAC receiver Reggie Virgil, who was enticed to Texas A&M, according to someone in the know at Miami, on the promise of $900,000 in NIL money.
Enticed by outside agents, Brea got more than that to go to Kentucky, said a UD insider.
No more Cinderella stories
Box and RedHawks’ athletics director David Sayler, in separate interviews Sunday, talked about what’s happening not just at Miami — which is not as impacted as many mid-major schools — but across the spectrum of college sports thanks to the portal and the lure of Name, Image and Likeness money.
“The portal is the driver of many of the problems in intercollegiate athletics,” Sayler said. “In my opinion, it’s driving a lot of decisions for all the wrong reasons. It fuels this constant churn of money, demand and coaching decisions.
“You see coaches leaving early too because they want to get in place when the portal opens.
“Too many people are out for themselves now and not leading for the greater good.”
With the portal open, by the time this story makes it to newsprint, every team in the area may have had its roster affected by players seeking perceived better times somewhere beyond the exit door.
Box estimated 2,000 to 3,000 players across college basketball would end up in the portal.
“This used to be the learning grounds for accountability and things of that sort,” he said. “It used to be about life lessons and being a part of something greater than yourself.
“Now it’s all transactional.
“And you’re already seeing what it’s doing to our game.
“The women’s side the NCAA Tournament is turning pointless and these same (ills) will get to the men. All you’ve got to do is turn on the TV now. Some of those (early) games were ugly.
“Games weren’t competitive. A lot of the scores were ridiculous. Mid-major schools get raided and a team is at even more of a disadvantage in athleticism.
“Upsets by the mid-majors won’t be happening. There won’t be any more Cinderella stories.
“And it’s going to affect the quality of play in the regular season, too.”
Sayler thinks Miami – which has an impressive campus, a degree that holds weight after graduation and whose athletic department works hard to create a nurturing culture you wouldn’t want to leave – has a path forward.
“But I think for some other programs, moving ahead will be really tricky.”
‘Money is the driving force’
While Box said it would take some kind of new legislation to create sensible parameters for the portal that would compensate raided schools and temper abuse, it’s hard to see how the NCAA is going to add brakes to this runaway train.
And so, Miami must try to be selective in who it picks up, while continuing to promote the school and the culture of its programs.
“It’s just that education isn’t as unimportant — even in the women’s game — as it once was. Money is the driving force,” Box said.
“Often, I can’t get three sentences into a conversation with a kid in the portal and they’re asking about money.
“And you don’t really know who you’re getting. Now you have all these hired guns. We’re all just trading players. It used to be you’d have a group of kids who grew up in a system. That was a beautiful thing.”
There is still some of that and Box said it’s especially rewarding when you get a player who wants to come to your school for the education and is committed to helping build the program.
Those players may be as rare as unicorns now, but Miami has a few, including Amber Tretter, a 6-foot-1 sophomore out of Ferdinand, Indiana, who had 15 points and 13 rebounds Sunday.
Another is senior Katy Richason, a 6-1 senior from Zionsville, Indiana, who came off the bench Sunday and had nine points and eight rebounds.
Both say they love Miami and chose the school for their academic pursuits.
Tretter is pursuing a degree in architecture and Richason is about to graduate with a degree in speech pathology, something she said she is “”passionate about.”
She said she’s staying in Oxford for the next two years to get her masters.
“I’ve gotten to do something I love at a school I love,” she said. “What’s better than that?”
Obviously, some people think there is something better, a point that Tretter touched on:
“Our whole team is very cohesive, and we love each other very much. But with know how the transfer portal is now and there’s a chance everyone could leave.”
That’s why Box said Monday he’d try to find out “who’s staying and who’s not” and then he too would head to the portal with hopes of filling out next season’s roster.
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