Alright, so, I wanted to keep tabs on the softball transfer portal. This whole thing is kinda new to me, I mean, back in the day, players pretty much stuck with their teams through thick and thin. But now? It’s a whole different ball game, so I figured I’d better get with the program.
First thing I did was try to find out where this “transfer portal” even was. Turns out, it’s not something you can just look up. It’s not public. So, that was a dead end. But, hey, I wasn’t gonna let that stop me.
Next, I started looking around for lists of players that have entered the portal. I found some articles talking about the “best” players in the portal for 2025 and which players were in the portal for 2024. It mentioned that the transfer window opened on May 19th. It was a little overwhelming at first, but I started to get the hang of it. I figured I’d better focus on one year at a time, so I decided to keep track of the 2024 transfers.
I made a simple list for myself. Nothing fancy, just the players’ names and their old and new schools. Every time I saw a new name pop up, I’d add it to my list. It was kind of interesting to see where everyone was going. You start to see patterns, like certain schools getting a lot of transfers, or players moving to be closer to home.
Here’s what I did:
- Searched for articles about softball transfers.
- Read through the articles to understand how the portal works.
- Decided to focus on the 2024 transfers.
- Created a list to track the players and their schools.
- Added new players to the list as I found them.
It wasn’t always easy. Sometimes the information was hard to find, or it was outdated. And honestly, it felt a little weird, like I was snooping on these players’ decisions. But I kept at it, because I wanted to see how this whole transfer thing played out.
My takeaways
So after doing this for a while, I started to see how much of an impact the transfer portal is having on college softball. It’s like free agency in the pros, but for college kids. It’s changing the game, for sure. It might not be the way things were done in the past, but it’s the reality now, and it’s kind of fascinating to watch it all unfold.
