Who won the men’s transfer portal?

We also have some news that I won't get too much into, but certainly today, so this is Tuesday, the news has come out that it looks like five and five is going to pass.

This will be official, I believe, on Wednesday, and this is essentially saying that you have five years of eligibility from the date in which you enroll in college or in the following academic year after you turn 19.

And, uh, my initial reaction is just like, what a mess.

[laughs] Like, just what a nonstop mess.

I have a lot of sympathy for so many people that will be impacted by this, whether it is a coach trying to figure out their roster and their roster limits, right? Now that you are inflexible on how many players you can carry, whether it is high school athletes in the class of 2027, whether it even is the college players right now who all of a sudden thought they were going into their senior year and now have an extra year if they want it, and determining like, "Gosh, like what do I do? I thought I was gonna get a job.

I thought I was gonna start turning pro.

Do I come back? Do I not?" Like, just such a mess, to be honest.

[laughs] And I will probably do a, a pod more on this once everything is official.

But I think at least within tennis, the key question I have is whether or not the national team exemption, which allegedly is b- what is being used so often for some players to still have eligibility, is going to be one of the things that goes by the wayside, or if it is something that will be kept much like the military exemptions are.

So that's an open question.

And then the other thing is I just think anyone that is thinking like, "Oh, great, we now have like age-based eligibility rules in place, therefore, you know, we won't have a bunch of these really old players in college tennis" I think yes and no.

So it will become unlikely that you see a 26-year-old in college tennis because for all intents and purposes, that person would have passed their kind of five years, uh, from kinda turning 19.

Although even that has some gray area to me in terms of it being after the start of the next academic year, so you could still see 25-year-old in college.

I think the misconception though that like this will really help pe- high school, like American students, I think that that's probably flawed because I think this five and five plus the combination of the Brant Meyer settlement, which allows you to accept any and all prize money prior to enrolling in college, it essentially means that any kinda 22-year-old player right now on tour who is fledgling in that pro career could come to college, doesn't have to worry about any of the paperwork or forging any documents around the prize money that they may or may not have taken, can enroll, and will have one to two years of eligibility.

And I think it, coaches in particular, and you heard this a lot in the kinda Sweet 16 press row that Gruskin did, coaches are incentivized to win.

These coaches, while maybe feeling the weight of what this all means for sort of like the long-term success of the sport and the viability of it at the junior level to have a, an aspirational experience to play college tennis eventually, that is certainly becoming harder and harder for even the most elite recruits in the US.

So I think coaches are very much incentivized, again, we heard this on the podcast of like, "Well, I'm gonna do what I'm gonna need to do to win and put food on my family's table" Like, the long-term goals and aspirations of college tennis like are something that they would strive for, but ultimately are gonna prioritize winning.

I think it's gonna be really hard for coaches to reject continuing to bring in 21, 22, 23-year-old players above 17, 18-year-old Americans.

So I do think this is gonna be a, a tension that will exist moving forward, and honestly, if you're an American, there's really no incentive to enroll prior to being 19.

There's a lot of downstream consequences of what that means for how players and families are, are planning out their high school career.

But yeah, I think my initial reaction is just like, this is gonna be such a mess.

[laughs] Like, the log jam it is gonna create on these rosters this year of players, you know, the, the players are gonna have to go in the transfer portal to use this additional year because some coaches are gonna rescind offers, others are not.

Like, it's just gonna be such a mess.

So that is my general reaction to this five and five.

Again, we'll have to have, like, a dedicated podcast for that, but it is certainly timely.