Life in the Transfer Portal

The Winter 2022 issue of ONE MARYLAND Magazine has arrived in the mailboxes of Terrapin Club members soon, but this is a sneak peak of one of its stories. 

ONE MARYLAND features stories of strength and perseverance, of determination and spirit. These stories define our athletics program, and this new magazine will allow us to share these stories with you. 

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Xavier Green wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to use his bonus year of college eligibility. 

A 1,000-point career scorer who was the MVP of Old Dominion’s Conference USA tournament title run in 2019, Green gave serious thought to turning pro and heading overseas.

Then he learned about what could come from name, image and likeness (NIL) legislation, thought about how much he could improve if he could contribute in a high-major program and found himself entering his name into an increasingly ubiquitous database.

The transfer portal.

“It was pretty easy,” says Green, who eventually opted to come to Maryland, where he has served as a defensive specialist off the bench during non-conference play. “I don’t see anything wrong with the portal. You put your name in there and it goes and spreads like wildfire. Honestly, it does. It spreads like wildfire. This coach hears about it, that coach hears about it.”

Soon after placing his name in the portal, there wasn’t a platform in which he wasn’t drawing attention. E-mail. Instagram. Twitter. Facebook. Texts. For a guy who was a relative latecomer among the more than 1,700 men’s basketball players who utilized the portal after the 2020-21 season, the response was instantaneous.

He quickly whittled his list down, settled on Maryland and committed in August.

“I wish I’d done it a little bit earlier so I could be with the team a little bit more,” Green says. “You want to make that decision a little bit sooner just so you can have time to look at schools and get to that school and spend the full summer with them.”

Unlike Green’s late arrival, Aurora Cordingley was in touch with Maryland about as quickly as she could be after entering her name into the portal on Memorial Day weekend.

That’s usually a busy time for Maryland on the field. This past spring, coach Cathy Reese set to work ensuring her program would play on the final days of the season in 2022. Adding Cordingley, a Canadian attacker who led Big Ten rival Johns Hopkins in goals (39) and points (57) last season, was a priority.

“I remember Cathy on the phone with me saying this is the first Memorial Day weekend in 11 or 12 years that she wasn’t there,” Cordingley says. “Cathy was the first coach to e-mail me. Within five minutes of putting my name in the portal, she e-mailed me. I think the caption on her subject heading was just ‘Terps’ with a bunch of exclamation points.”

It wasn’t hard to sell Cordingley on making the 40-minute drive south. Maryland was on the short list of dream schools she once composed in high school. The school also checked the academic box. Cordingley wanted to get a graduate degree in business and management, a concentration that wasn’t available at Hopkins.

She was in touch with about 10 programs and talked to eight, but it was quickly clear her portal experience was going to be simple.

“I was only in the portal for six days,” Cordingley says. “After that first conversation with Cathy, in the back of my head, I said ‘I’m going to go to Maryland.’ I spoke to other coaches, but none of them made me feel the way I did when I was talking with Cathy. It was such an easy decision, stress-free just because it was so quick.”

Cordingley’s case illustrates how the portal permits someone to effectively narrow priorities down and sort them out. As with so many graduate transfers looking for a new school, on- and off-field considerations both were factors.

“After four years at Hopkins, obviously I loved my experience and my friends and I had the best time ever, but I knew I needed something else,” Cordingley says. “I kind of wanted that bigger-school kind of experience, but also just the opportunity to play for Cathy and one of the most historic programs in women’s lacrosse. It was something I couldn’t pass up.”

Making a similar jump is men’s lacrosse midfielder Jonathan Donville, though there’s one notable difference. While Cordingley played last season, Donville didn’t get to compete in his final year at Cornell because the Ivy League effectively shut down for the entire school year.

However, even before the Ivy’s decision to cancel its spring season, Donville knew he wanted to capitalize on the NCAA’s blanket eligibility waiver tied to the pandemic. And more than anything, he didn’t want the decision to hover deep into the spring.

He was close with Maryland midfielder Bubba Fairman, who he played with at Deerfield Academy during a postgraduate year. And he knew he wanted to pursue a master’s degree in journalism.

“There’s only a couple schools that I was realistically going to go to, and one of them was Syracuse, which is one of our biggest rivals at Cornell, so I probably wasn’t going to go right down the street to a rival school,” Donville says.

Donville had firm control of his process from the start. He chose to enter the portal in the fall of 2020. More importantly, he decided he would not allow coaches to contact him once he decided on a transfer, an element of the portal that can tamp down on the chaos so many others experience.

The day after filing with the portal, he e-mailed Maryland coach John Tillman and said he was coming to College Park. It’s hard to imagine an easier recruiting process for a coach, especially when it yields a player who was a second-team All-America pick in the abbreviated 2020 season.

But it worked for Donville as well, who should be a significant contributor to a program coming off a national title game appearance last season.

“My situation is unique in the sense I wanted to study a program that is not offered in a lot of places,” Donville says. “Even talking to friends who are going through the process now, really limited the number of schools I could go to. But I have no regrets about how I handled that and I’m happy I’m here. This is a really good place to be a graduate student. The school is set up well, and the coordination between academics and athletics is outstanding as far as I can tell.”

While Donville knew he would be coming to Maryland nearly a year before beginning classes, the move was more unexpected for Ian Martinez. The guard played basketball at Utah last season as a freshman, and even after a coaching change, he wanted to take his time to measure the new situation when the Utes made a new hire.

Ultimately, he decided to take a look elsewhere after his first college season.

“It’s not that I didn’t feel comfortable there,” Martinez says. “I just thought it was a good chance to explore opportunities outside of Utah. … It just took some time to decide whether I was going to do it or not. I didn’t want to go from one place to another. I was in California and then I was in Utah, and I was looking to stay in one place and try to build my name there as a player and a person.”

Martinez soon had the same experience as Green and Cordingley, getting inundated with messages from programs across the country. It started around 8 the morning his name registered in the portal with a phone call from Pepperdine’s Lorenzo Romar, and it snowballed from there.

A day or two later, he heard from Maryland assistant Matt Brady, who had recruited Martinez out of high school. The Terps made an aggressive push, but Martinez was determined to take his time and make sure he found a situation that was good not just for his basketball prospects but for his family as well.

“It was like going through the same recruiting process as in high school,” Martinez says. “It was kind of crazy for a little bit because a lot of schools wanted me to have meetings with them. You can’t say yes to everybody. As always, you try to be polite and respect everyone because that’s what they deserve.”

Martinez eventually chose Maryland, where he is a steady contributor off the bench this season after missing part of the offseason after suffering a knee injury. Like so many others who have switched schools, Martinez used the portal to improve his own experience while seeking an excellent competitive outlet.

Priorities differ from person to person, though the portal has proven to be a more structured recruiting experience than the one experienced when they first chose a college.

“You have to evaluate the positives and negatives about schools,” Green says. “A lot of times, it’s [about] what you want. Knowing my situation, I’ve been around, so I knew what I wanted. It was easier to make the situation. Coming out of high school and going through it, it’s different because you don’t know. It was way easier because I could dig down and say ‘I want it like this.’” 

Patrick Stevens (Maryland ‘02) has covered Maryland football and other local college sports for several outlets over the last 20 years.