(Editor’s note: This is the third in a three-part series with St. Bonaventure men’s basketball coach Mark Schmidt on the challenges and change in landscape created by the transfer portal and NIL legislation. Today: the direct impact on Bona and where the program stands today.)
To Mark Schmidt, there’s become an unavoidable bottom line to all of this.
Yes, there’s plenty to dislike about this new era of the transfer portal and NIL rules, especially the mostly negative impact it’s had on mid-major college basketball programs such as St. Bonaventure’s.
It’s okay to lament the fact that teams will no longer be sustained the way they always had been, that middling programs have essentially become farm teams for the power conferences, that an uneven playing field has been created as a result of NIL package availability.
“And it’s a shame,” Schmidt, the Bonnies’ now-17th year coach maintained in late April.
“But our job now is … you gotta adjust to the rules. The rules are what they are, and if you don’t, then you’re outta the game. So you gotta adjust. We’re looking at the portal and doing what everybody else is doing.”
Bona, of course, has recently done as much adjusting — experienced as much fluctuation — as anybody at the Division I level.
A program that had long prided itself on recruiting, and developing, unheralded prospects such as Dion Wright, Denzel Gregg and LaDarien Griffin, Bona, in the last three years, has gone from welcoming its entire starting five back (in 2021-22), to losing its entire team, to again returning its core group.
In that time, Schmidt has had to revamp his bench in every offseason. He’s had to transition from recruiting mostly four-year high school kids to using the portal to find standout transfers at lower levels. He now has to try to attract kids, and keep them, despite limitations in NIL allotment.
TO THIS point, under those circumstances, his staff has done an admirable job.
Indeed, a bad year for most Atlantic 10 teams is a drop to the bottom four and a Round 1 “pillow fight” matchup in the league tournament. For Bona, a down year was finishing a game shy of .500 in league play and still earning a single-digit A-10 seed (No. 9) with what amounted to an expansion squad.
Bona, though, would certainly welcome a bit more stability after what it’s endured over the last 13 months. And with today being the deadline for players to enter the transfer portal, it appears as though it has it.
Indeed, a game into last season, the Bonnies had exactly zero points and zero rebounds back from the year before. This year, however, with their entire starting five, and top six players overall, scheduled to return, they have back 90 percent of their scoring and 67 percent of their rebounding. And more important than that, they now have a year together, and a year in Schmidt’s system, on which to build.
Of the footing Bona has seemingly found, Schmidt noted, “Hopefully we’ll have our core back and right now we do. We had some guys off the bench (transfer), but that’s the nature of the business now. There’s 1,700, 1,800 guys in the portal. Every team’s gonna lose 3-4 guys, that’s just how it is.”
As it now hits the all-important summer months, Bona has turned the page from what Schmidt deemed an “unfair” situation last winter.
“(Unreasonable) … in terms of those guys coming in and no one was able to teach them anything,” he said. “It was all on (the coaches). And now we’ve got those 5-6 guys that have been through it a year, and not only are they more comfortable and they know what we as coaches expect, but now they can help the younger guys, the new guys that are coming in …
“(Like) running a set. We can put those five guys out there and say, ‘this is Slant 2,’ and they can show the young guys, ‘alright, this is how it’s run.’ Whereas last year, we didn’t have any of that. We had the coaches out there showing them what to do.”
IN REFLECTING on how Bona had long been able to build it, beginning with Andrew Nicholson in 2008 through the celebrated starting five of 2021-22, with the likes of Wright and Jaylen Adams (who almost certainly would have been poached after his freshman or sophomore year in the current era), Schmidt acknowledged, “You’ll never see that again; you’ll never see that again. Dion was different. His mom and dad (wanted this). LaDarien Griffin (was the same way).
“But nowadays, those guys would have been going right after the last game.”
And he reiterated, the job as a head coach now is to build a new team for every year. He compared it to being a professional basketball organization, only without the salary cap. “That’s what everybody’s doing now,” he said.
Despite this increasingly turbulent nature, however, Bona has seemingly again been able to create a little bit of consistency, find a little bit of calm, within the ever-changing topography of college hoops.
YES, BONA has back its entire starting quintet, including Third Team All-Conference guard Daryl Banks III, rising sophomore Yan Farell and emerging center Chad Venning, who could probably be viewed as last year’s team MVP. It’s also welcomed in of the portal’s most established guards and scorers in Bryant transfer Charles Pride, giving the Bonnies a trio of 1,000-plus-point scorers in the backcourt (Pride, Banks III and Moses Flowers) plus another high-ceiling Putnam product in 6-foot-8 forward Duane Thompson.
Does Bona again have the players to compete for a top-four position in the A-10?
That remains to be seen.
But talent aside, it’s lightyears ahead of where it was at this time last year, and a place like Bona, that can make all the difference.
“But just imagine if those guys had been in the program for three years, and then you’re even that much further ahead,” Schmidt pointed out. “That’s the frustration, but that’s what it’s gonna be every year.”
The hope now, though, at least, is that after the unusually perfect storm of last spring, the Bonnies bring back at least a couple key building blocks, a bit of a core, with each passing season, no matter how difficult it becomes to do so.
“(Last year) when those guys left really late, it was abnormal,” Schmidt said. “It was just a whole different scenario. The bench guys left because they thought all those guys were coming back, so we lost our whole team.
“Now hopefully as we go forward, we’ll have two or three or four guys that will still be here that will show the guys how to do it. And it’s not just on the court; it’s the culture off the court, it’s how you behave, the work ethic, going to class. Your leaders become leaders because they’ve been shown by juniors and seniors. We didn’t have that last year.
“Our leaders were guys that were good players at other programs the year before. Now, they’re our guys.”
