The future of City 6 men’s basketball: Recruiting also means re-recruiting in transfer-portal era | Mike Jensen

His phone had been kind of blowing up, Taylor Funk said. The St. Joseph’s Hawks men’s basketball season had just ended. Funk can confirm, you don’t have to put your name in the transfer portal to see if there’s a market out there.

“Once you’re a Division I player, you get to know many other Division I players,” is the way the Hawks forward put it.

If everyone knows everyone, word gets around. Funk also knew he could hire an agent and pursue his professional future, because prospective agents were telling him this.

Time for what Funk called a “very mature” conversation with his Hawks coach, Billy Lange.

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Let’s argue this was as important as any conversation Lange has had, with anybody, since Lange was hired in 2019. If Taylor Funk, who averaged 17.4 points a game this past season, decided that three full seasons on Hawk Hill — plus an abbreviated one that got him a redshirt — were plenty, maybe move to a powerhouse for a season, it’s fair to wonder if the Billy Lange era of St. Joseph’s hoops could ever achieve liftoff.

Not overstating that. The decisions of Funk and big-time freshman Jordan Hall — stay, or see what enticing options are on the other side of that transfer portal door — could have been a quick referendum on the Lange era.

In his mind, Funk didn’t want his recent talk with Lange to be coach to player — he needed it to be deeper than that, Funk said, almost like father to son. He told Lange how his decision would be partly based on his goal of making the NBA — “I’m not going to stop until I hear no.”

Lange was upfront, Funk said, not skirting around the possibility that there would be a big-time market for a 6-foot-8 player of Funk’s abilities if he chose the transfer route, no longer the skinny albeit highly-touted kid who showed up on Hawk Hill from Manheim Central in 2017.

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“You want to go wear Duke across your chest, yeah, you can wear Duke across your chest," Funk remembers Lange saying.

If Duke itself didn’t have a spot ... a program of that stature was the inference. One source said Funk had received an overture from a school that had made a Final Four appearance in recent years.

The conversation wasn’t the only factor, nor was it the only conversation obviously with his coach. They were on the same page.

“I’m going to stay at St. Joe’s," Funk said last week.

Retaining Funk and a talented freshman such as Hall is just crucial in this era when the rules are changing and the transfer portal is always churning, the NCAA Division I Council voting to recommend transfers have one-time instant eligibility at their next stop. With more than 1,000 players reportedly moving through the portal this year, that amounts to roughly three per every Division I school. Call it what it is: free agency. (By the way, not all those moves are by the player’s choice.)

“I don’t want to say it’s more important than recruiting," Lange said of the issue of retention. “But it’s definitely not less important than recruiting.”

The fact that Funk was looking for a father-son type conversation with Lange suggests the talk was in no way adversarial. But it did involve some real talk about his role next season, so that Funk wouldn’t just be playing center or “a pick-and-pop four.” Lange was able to assure Funk that wouldn’t be the case, that he had a more varied usage in mind.

“I had zero desire to start you at the five," Lange told Funk, and let him know that at least one more big man might be joining the team from the transfer portal.

Lange didn’t mention a name to Funk, but 15 minutes after Funk was done relating his conversation with his coach to a reporter, there was a Tweet from Hawkhillhardwood … “St. Joe’s has landed Vanderbilt grad transfer Ejike Obinna. 6′10 240-pound big man should help give the Hawks an interior presence they missed this year. News first reported by @JonRothstein.”

“It can be dizzying, it can be seductive,” Lange said of all the players hitting the transfer portal, some players moving on from the big time after not getting playing time, others looking to move up after they’ve proven themselves at a lower level. They all pass through the portal now.

La Salle center Jared Kimbrough entered the day after the last Explorers game, which he had started. Villanova’s Cole Swider hit it this week. Myles Douglas of St. Joe’s didn’t wait for the season to end to put his name in the portal.

Of course, the portal is only one aspect of recruiting. But now that it’s part of the landscape, and if college coaches start paying attention to top prospects as soon as they get to high school, Lange said, “I’m theoretically recruiting eight years worth of basketball players with a four-man staff.”

If Drexel hadn’t made this year’s NCAA Tournament, it’s not hard to imagine one or two top Dragons saying maybe they’d try to get March Madness another way. During the NCAA Tournament, Damion Lee, now with the Golden State Warriors, was great about expressing his love and support for Drexel on social media. Lee left out the part that he transferred from Drexel to Louisville for his senior year.

Transfers obviously aren’t a new thing. La Salle has done very well with transfers. There’s no way there would have been a 2013 NCAA Sweet 16 run without Ramon Galloway coming back from South Carolina and Tyrone Garland transferring home from Virginia Tech. More recently, Pookie Powell and David Beatty have been among incoming Explorers.

“If you’re just recruiting the transfer portal blind, without relationships, you don’t know what you’re getting," said Explorers coach Ashley Howard. “Every kid is leaving for a reason. It’s hard to have a plan for someone you don’t know.”

Someone you do know … “You want to jump on it fast,” Howard said. “When there are guys that you know, you’re in a position to jump on it fast, because you probably know it’s going to happen before it happens.”

The key to getting these local programs back up and running with some success, Temple coach Aaron McKie said, is about, “getting older and staying older.” Meaning you need high school recruits developing, but maybe transfers coming in to supplement.

“We’re in it every day," McKie said of the transfer portal, echoing comments by his local brethren.

There is a concern across the landscape, all these coaches said, about how the shifts in loyalties play out year to year.

“It’s hard to trust,” McKie said. “Nobody wants to buy completely in. … It’s always one foot in, one foot out, and I’m cut from a different cloth.”

Don’t get him wrong, he’s playing by the current rules. He’s lost transfers and brought some in. Top 2020-21 Owls scorer Khalif Battle started his career at Butler. Leading rebounder Jake Forrester began at Indiana.

A lot of coaches buy into this “get old and stay old” theory, pointing out that the transfer portal keeps replenishing, so there’s no need to panic and bring someone in just to fill a slot. With so many college players available via the portal, and Dahmir Bishop and Jack Forrest on his own Hawks roster last season courtesy of the portal, Lange put his objective for recruiting high school players like this: “I’m going to go after guys who we think are going to change the program.”

Of course, such players are a commodity all over, even after they get to college. That’s why it was a big deal when Neumann-Goretti assistant coach John Brennan put out on Twitter early in March: “Coaches, basketball ppl, etc. — Jordan Hall is not transferring. He’s looking forward to getting better as a player and building on SJU’s late season success with his current/future teammates and staff. Let this tweet put to rest all speculation and rumors. #Respectfully”

“I don’t want to disclose any schools, but there was an inordinate amount of false rumors and coaches reaching out,” Brennan said of why he put that out publicly. “Even after Jordan met with Coach Lange and told him he was staying.” If the situation is status quo, Brennan said, “No type of announcement should even have to be made, but the hearsay was exhausting.”

The interview with Funk kind of served the same public purpose. Funk said he looked at the work he was able to do getting ready for this past season mostly on his own during the pandemic and believes his offseason work can be that much more intense in 2021 and his jump “can be even bigger this year to next year.”

Funk said there have been “no more messing around” conversations with teammates, that none of them were happy obviously with a 5-15 season, but everyone has been in the gym since it ended. “I think we’re hungry,” Funk said.

Before speaking with Lange, Funk said he talked it over with his parents, was open talking about how he prayed over it. Still, there was basketball to be discussed with Lange, how using Funk coming off screens and flares would be an increasing part of what the Hawks will do.

“The outsiders are going to say, ‘Go, go, go. What are you staying for?’” Funk said. “They don’t know the inside and what is going on, and what this team is capable of.”

You can’t stay old until you get old. After all the growing pains seen by these local programs lately, the next phase is seeing how players such as Hall and Jhamir Brickus at La Salle, guards who played older than their years as freshmen, develop into veterans. The Explorers can suddenly look older next year, with Brickus the only sophomore in a returning starting five. Meanwhile, Temple has an influx of talent coming in next season to join older returnees, close to getting it back on track, if you listen to the AAU coaches in town.

Getting old is still the process right now after local coaching changeovers. We’ve all watched the growing pains around the city. Whether next season marks a real uptick, all to be determined. For his part, Funk sounds at peace. If he wants the word Duke across his shirt, he can find one online. Special offer right now on Fanatics.com, $25.99, 365-day return policy.

“I think we have what I need,” Funk said of his decision to shun the portal door to stay on Hawk Hill. Maybe Funk can pay a little extra and customize an old-school jersey, emblazon it with “the Billy Lange era starts right here,” because his decision meant it wouldn’t end there.