LSU lands trio of guards from transfer portal
LSU women's basketball announced the addition of three transfer portal players Wednesday afternoon.
Guard trio Mjralce Sheppard from Mississippi State, Miami guard Shayeann Day-Wilson and former Arizona guard Kailyn Gilbert have signed to play for Kim Mulkey and the Tigers.
After the departures of star Angel Reese to the WNBA and point guard Hailey Van Lith, freshmen guards Janae
Kent and Angelica Velez all to the portal, fans have been waiting with bated breath for the coaching staff to make its pursuits from the transfer portal known. LSU advanced to the Elite Eight this season when it lost to eventual national runner-up Iowa and Caitlin Clark.
Between Gilbert and Day-Wilson, LSU has added 388 career assists, significantly increasing the quality of point guard play for the Tigers heading into the 2024-25 season to go along with returner Last-Tear Poa and incoming freshman Jada Richard.
Sheppard is the youngest of the three new guards for LSU but had a solid freshman campaign, including a strong performance in Mississippi State's upset win over LSU.
The additions of Sheppard, Gilbert and Day-Wilson brings LSU's transfer portal class up to four players thus far. The first was former Arkansas combo player Jersey Wolfenbarger, who committed to play for Mulkey and the Tigers in March.
There is still room for LSU to bring in another transfer or two.
the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open − along with some Saudi investment, no doubt, you can create great events that make top players very rich without asking them to grind their bodies to dust globetrotting for 25-plus weeks a year to cash checks and collect ranking points.
You can, in essence, build a tennis version of Formula 1.
But there's one big problem with that theory: Tennis isn't Formula 1. It's a sport where your week-to-week ranking either creates an opportunity or a challenge.
It's a sport where fortunes rise and fall, a sport where it's possible for somebody like American journeyman Chris Eubanks to change his life because he got hot for a few weeks on the grass last summer. It's a sport where you eat what you kill and you get what you deserve. It's a sport where the mere existence of tournaments around the world have inspired future champions.
Is that all about to change? Details are still scarce. But there's no doubt that major changes are afoot in the structure of tennis, with the four Grand Slams on one team and the ATP/ WTA tours on another.
Up until now, the Slams have all operated as independent entities. Though they collaborate occasionally on some issues, they each own their two-week place on the calendar and the massive amounts of revenue that they generate but little else. The ATP and WTA sanction the week-to-week tournaments that make up their tour schedules and sell their media rights as part of a combined package, but each event is owned and operated individually in terms of ticket sales and certain sponsorships.
Last week, for example, there were smaller men's tournaments in Bucharest, Romania; Barcelona, Spain, and Munich while there were women's tournaments in Stuttgart, Germany, and Rouen, France. On the surface, this doesn't make a lot of sense. Why would you have Munich and Barcelona competing to attract top players instead of one bigger tournament where they're all in the same field competing for bigger prize money?
It's a fair point! And it's exactly the problem that golf is currently grappling with thanks to LIV Golf poaching some of the world's top players from the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour. All sports are better when the best are playing the best as often as possible.
But in the reported version of a premium tour that is owned and operated by the Grand Slams, the only tennis that will really matter takes place 14 times a year. Every other tournament, essentially, is reduced to being part of a developmental league where there's no real incentive for top players to participate.
And that's a potential disaster for tennis writ large.
Don't believe me? Just listen to Roger Federer, who famously volunteered to be a ball boy at the Swiss Indoors, a tournament that drew the likes of Boris Becker, Stefan Edberg and Michael Stich − all Wimbledon champions he idolized growing up.
“I was able to see the best players in the world firsthand, how they would prepare, how they would sweat, how they deal with the pressure,” he said in a 2017 interview with Tennis TV. “At heart, I'm always going to be a ball boy.”
Does Federer become Federer if he doesn't have an ATP tournament coming through his hometown of Basel?
Maybe that's too dramatic. But in a premium tour designed by the Grand Slams, tournaments from Charleston, South Carolina, to Washington, D.C., from Rio de Janeiro to Guadalajara, Mexico, and from Rotterdam, Netherlands, to Vienna essentially become irrelevant.
Do those tournaments always get the best players? No. But they're big events locally that players love, that sell a whole lot of tickets and put tennis front and center in those markets on an annual basis.
What purpose does it serve to tell fans that those tournaments don't matter anymore? How does that grow the game?
Some of the ideas behind a premium tour are solid. Equal prize money, which exists at the Grand Slams but not everywhere else, should be a priority. Better television exposure than the current mishmash of tennis media rights would benefit fans. Knowing when and where the big stars are going to show up is helpful for sponsors and ticket buyers.
But if the four Grand Slams wrest control of the sport and marginalize everything but the 14 biggest tournaments, the sport becomes ossified. The path to building new stars, creating interest at the grassroots level and giving young prospects a chance to rise through the ranks becomes more complicated.
Is that worth fattening the pockets of a few dozen players at the top of the sport and the tournaments themselves? That's the question at the heart of tennis' backroom civil war. How it turns out, at this point, is anybody's guess.