MBB: College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin

[Greek Tragedy]

https://x.com/JacksonGoebel5/status/1907412074960994577?t=sa4pSe9UUA5AeThoutYdOw&s=19

Jackson Goebel out of Lomira, is headed to Carthage. He was 1st team all-conference and HM D4 All-State.

[markerickson]

The portal impacts all levels and sports, including a heavy reliance at North Park. Just curious, does Vetter from nat'l champ Trinity bite on a scholly at a level or two above three?

[GusD]

The portal impacts all levels and sports, including a heavy reliance at North Park. Just curious, does Vetter from nat'l champ Trinity bite on a scholly at a level or two above three?

Not sure why Vetter wouldn't bite on a D2 or, especially, on a D1 scholarship. Especially, given the fact that so many kids consider themselves too good or above D3, and basically an under performer unless they secure an athletic scholarship at some point on their athletic journey. We see this carried to the point where some kids will attend an academically inferior school, often an NAIA school, just so they can say they got a (athletic) scholarship. Vetter, of course, could be programmed differently. From a family economic standpoint, he probably doesn't need it as much as many others. He is originally from Kenilworth, IL, an ultra rich suburban Chicago enclave. Prior to Trinity, he attended Canterbury School in New Milford, CT. Tuition there is currently $77,650!! Highly doubtful his family is anywhere near what could be termed economically disadvantaged. Yet, from a competitive standpoint, why not accept a D2 or D1 scholarship if one is offered?

On the second point referred to above, namely North Park's (very) heavy reliance on the reliance on the Transfer Portal, I find this a very interesting situation. Most teams nowadays are going to have some transfers on the roster. Get a couple of JUCO transfers, or even possibly a D2 or two, and there's a good chance you can instantly significantly boost the skill level of your roster. Still, I would think the majority of D3 rosters are composed of kids coming directly from high school. However, if you peruse this season's NPU roster, of the 17 players listed (with jersey numbers) on the varsity roster, it appears only 5 of the 17——- DJ Strong, DJ Wallace, Lance Nelson, Mike Vuckovic, and Jahki Gray, matriculated to NPU directly from high school. Three players attended 2 schools before NPU, and one player made stops at 3 other institutions before finding his way to North Park. So, as markerickson advised, a heavy reliance on the Transfer Portal indeed.

[Gotberg]

The portal impacts all levels and sports, including a heavy reliance at North Park. Just curious, does Vetter from nat'l champ Trinity bite on a scholly at a level or two above three?

Not sure why Vetter wouldn't bite on a D2 or, especially, on a D1 scholarship. Especially, given the fact that so many kids consider themselves too good or above D3, and basically an under performer unless they secure an athletic scholarship at some point on their athletic journey. We see this carried to the point where some kids will attend an academically inferior school, often an NAIA school, just so they can say they got a (athletic) scholarship. Vetter, of course, could be programmed differently. From a family economic standpoint, he probably doesn't need it as much as many others. He is originally from Kenilworth, IL, an ultra rich suburban Chicago enclave. Prior to Trinity, he attended Canterbury School in New Milford, CT. Tuition there is currently $77,650!! Highly doubtful his family is anywhere near what could be termed economically disadvantaged. Yet, from a competitive standpoint, why not accept a D2 or D1 scholarship if one is offered?

Henry's father Alex is the CEO of cars.com, so money is definitely not a decision point.

Alex was originally from the East Coast and there's a good chance he attended Canterbury as well.  He was a D1 athlete himself, having played Lacrosse at Providence College.

[nescac1]

I've seen no indication that Vetter is looking to transfer - and really, if money isn't a decisive factor, why would he?  He has only one year left at a school and program he presumably loves, and an opportunity to leave an incredible legacy with a historic class (including two other classmates who will also be potential all-Americans next year).  Given how decimated most of the other top 10 D3 teams are this off-season, he has a very good chance to play in a third-straight Final Four, for a third-straight NESCAC title, and for a second straight national title.  And accordingly he has a chance to go down as the leader of the clear best team in NESCAC history (which is really saying something) and indeed one of the best in NCAA D3 history with a second national title.  And, he gets a Trinity degree in the process.  I'm sure there will end up being some teams in Trinity's echelon next year but as of now they are far and away the best returning team. 

vs. ... one year as, say, a decent starter on a lower-tier D1 team that is going nowhere, with entirely new coaches, teammates, etc.  It might be different if he was like a Duncan Robinson type who could end up at a high D1 school or something, but that isn't the kind of program he would land at with only one year of eligibility left. 

[Gregory Sager]

On the second point referred to above, namely North Park's (very) heavy reliance on the reliance on the Transfer Portal, I find this a very interesting situation. Most teams nowadays are going to have some transfers on the roster. Get a couple of JUCO transfers, or even possibly a D2 or two, and there's a good chance you can instantly significantly boost the skill level of your roster. Still, I would think the majority of D3 rosters are composed of kids coming directly from high school. However, if you peruse this season's NPU roster, of the 17 players listed (with jersey numbers) on the varsity roster, it appears only 5 of the 17——- DJ Strong, DJ Wallace, Lance Nelson, Mike Vuckovic, and Jahki Gray, matriculated to NPU directly from high school. Three players attended 2 schools before NPU, and one player made stops at 3 other institutions before finding his way to North Park. So, as markerickson advised, a heavy reliance on the Transfer Portal indeed.

There's nothing "interesting" about this at all, as the explanation is so obvious that any number of non-NPU fans to whom I've spoken over the past three years have figured it out independently and basically just sought me out in order to confirm it.

The North Park MBB program was in very bad shape when Sean Smith took over as head coach three years ago, and that was largely because the previous coaching staff had been unable to sustain the successful recruitment of CCIW-quality freshmen after that remarkable two-year burst in the middle of the last decade that brought in Juwan Henry and T.J. Cobbs in the fall of 2013 and then Jordan Robinson and Colin Lake the following year. In fact, the influx of good freshman recruits went from strong to practically non-existent over the course of a single year's recruiting cycle. From Lake's senior season (2017-18), when he made the All-CCIW team as part of a dramatically depleted Vikings team that fell off of the cliff after that 2017 CCIW co-championship, to the hiring of Sean Smith four years later, there was almost nobody brought in as an 18-year-old by the staff who was capable of evolving into a really good CCIW-level starter. The lone exception was Toby Marek, who was All-CCIW second team in 2019-20, although I'll add that Matt Szuba, Veggie Tangen, and (before he transferred out) Michael Osborne were at least league-average players.

Thus, when Sean and Ed arrived in the spring of 2022 they inherited the Boyd brothers (one of whom, Jalen, had been All-CCIW in 2021-22), who had transferred in from Loras the previous year, a pair of unproven but promising home-grown underclassmen bigs in Karl Polk, Jr. and Adam Bulwa (the latter of whom hadn't even been a starter at New Trier, but was a physically gifted young man with a strong desire to improve and a considerable work ethic) who would eventually round into decent role players off of the bench for NPU, and pretty much nothing else in the way of players who could contribute at the high level this league requires.

Realizing that the recruiting pipeline to local high schools was broken, and with no time remaining in the recruiting cycle to locate and successfully woo graduating HS seniors, anyway, Sean and Ed adopted a fast-paced pressing style of play, combed through the transfer portal to find guys who were dissatisfied at the end of the benches of their respective scholarship teams and who were willing to do the off-season work to prep themselves for the rigors of a style of play designed for 94 feet of defense for forty minutes a game (and a run-and-gun offense to go with it), and filled up the roster with a bevy of new transfers. The result, of course, was a CCIW tourney championship and a run to the Sweet Sixteen in the D3 dance.

But you can't create a brand off of one successful run. You need to sustain it in order to make your mark with area HS head coaches. Sean and now Ed have tried to do that by continuing to draw water from the transfer-portal well in order to repeat the success of that 2022-23 season, and it obviously hasn't worked. But I think the trick is to get the formula right in terms of balancing the recruitment and development of four-year players with the influx of transfers (after all, transfers have been an important part of North Park men's basketball since the late 1960s), and it appears to me that Ed McGhee and Aaron Jacobs are well aware of that and are trying to find that proper balance in terms of who they're bringing in to re-stock the roster for 2025-26.

TL; DR -- You can't rebuild a busted high-school recruitment pipeline overnight as a new head coach, and at the same time you have to have some success in the program in order to fuel the inducement of high-school seniors (and the approval of the coaches who in a lot of cases gatekeep for them) -- and the obvious manner to gain that success quickly is via transfers.

(Also, Mike Vuckovic is a transfer from Harper College out in Palatine.)