I also think the new roster sizes will have a greater impact on small sports like ours. With the Covid eligibility years now behind us the effect of roster limits will be evident fairly quickly.
Ultimately, you’d have to think it will lead to more parity as hoarding of talent will be much harder to achieve for a couple reasons other than the obvious.
As Everist said on WPW, recruiting that kid that you hope/expect to coach up and blossom will likely go away.
Recruits knowing this may want to exchange some degree of certainty vs potential to be forced into the portal. For the very top recruits probably doesn’t matter that much, but then again there are only a handful of those guys every year, right?
I also get the sense that we will also see the average age of the top teams start to creep up as well. Once the dust settles and with the directionality of the portal not changing, even if portal activity were to decrease over all, those top teams would be getting older on average.
I guess the question would be, where and how will younger players go to develop further. For instance, Tom Leggett, graduated from Oak Christian then took a gap year and trained at the Naval Academy Prep school. So for a Sophomore he is a year older than the general American sophomores. Many of the internationals are coming in as 20 year old Freshmen. For our kids to compete with that, USA water polo needs to push Club play into the U21 level and find a way for kids to keep developing without losing eligibility like they do by playing at a CC. The hard part is that most kids want to be done with college and get into the work force. Unless we can slow down internationals at the college level, or create a path way to develop our youth between high school and the time they turn 20, water polo as we know it in the US will die, first at the youth level, then at the college level. We keep saying that the international players are raising the level of the sport, that cannot be denied, but that plus roster limits will deny many decent players the opportunity to ever find out if they could have developed and competed at the top level her in the US (D1 College). This will result in the slow death of Water Polo in the US.
Harvard’s James Rozolis-Hill has entered the transfer portal. By far one of the best players to ever enter the portal in the sport. He has one year of eligibility remaining. Tough to see someone giving up a Harvard degree after three years… we shall see
Hard to believe and a tough blow to east coast water polo. I can only imagine it’s a transfer to Stanford with a full ride. Anything else just doesn’t make sense (even that doesn’t really make sense).
Last year Princeton lost Temkin to Stanford and my understanding was that the USMNT coaches “encouraged” him to transfer. I wonder if that’s the case with JRH? If he’s interested in making the Olympics, this makes sense.
Perhaps. I’m not in his shoes, so I guess it’s not fair of me to speculate and second guess his decision.
That being said, am not sure about the Olympics argument - maybe if it was 2026. If it was me and that was my goal, I’d finish my career as the greatest Harvard water polo player ever (although he arguably already is) and then concentrate on making the team. The older Dodd did this by taking a year off the year before the games.
Maybe he redshirts next year and trains with the Stanford team and learns the system, does a 5th year co-term masters for his final year of eligibility then spends the next year trying out for the team. BTW, this is complete speculation. For all I know, he could be a big time CS nerd and wants that Stanford degree. We’ll see.
When he and Ted were featured on WaterPoloWednesday, I remember him mentioning law school. I went back and watched the interview and the kid seemed set on going to law school.