Wisconsin’s Kelly Sheffield takes issue with volleyball transfer-portal window
· Yahoo Sports
MADISON – Wisconsin volleyball had some juggling to do with the end of its 2025 NCAA tournament run and the start of its 2026 transfer-portal shopping.
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The Badgers’ season ended on a Thursday night with their five-set heartbreak against Kentucky in the Final Four. By that Saturday, the Badgers lost five players to the transfer portal, and ex-Florida star Jaela Auguste announced her commitment to UW.
Wisconsin could be in position to have to do some more juggling in 2026 if a proposal for a revised transfer-portal window succeeds. The window would be shorter, but most notably would continue to overlap with the second and third weekends of the NCAA tournament.
UW volleyball coach Kelly Sheffield acknowledged there is “not a perfect place” in the calendar for the portal window, but he also believes there are “places that are more wrong.”
“I think putting it while people are still playing – no matter how many people are still playing – is very, very challenging for those athletes,” Sheffield said. “It is very, very stressful for those athletes, extremely stressful for those athletes. We lived in that space last year.”
For coaches in the second or third weekends of the tournament, it requires them to be immersed in portal recruiting while also obviously being immersed in the team’s postseason run.
Similarly, players interested in transferring – ultimately a group of six last year for the Badgers – have to juggle their long-term opportunities in the portal with their immediate postseason goals.
“You want to be really, really good teammates,” Sheffield said. “You want to be good for the program. But yet every day that the portal is open, those players know that they are losing out on opportunities. … It’s tough for those guys. To me, having a cooling-off period or a period of reflection after the season makes a whole lot of sense.”
Sheffield believes that college volleyball could implement a similar portal window as football, which will run from Jan. 4-13 after the 2026 season. That comes with a time crunch for athletes to find their new schools and enroll in time for the spring semester, however.
Sheffield is not the only prominent college volleyball coach to express displeasure with the proposed portal timing.
Pittsburgh coach Dan Fisher said in one of his news conferences that he is “really, really disappointed in this recommendation.” Texas A&M coach Jamie Morrison told the outlet TexAgs that it “steals joy from the NCAA tournament.”
“When you talk about the coaches that are typically still playing and have been in that, there is not a single coach in the country that – if they’re in our situation – that would think that would be good for any of the players,” Sheffield said.
The aforementioned coaches’ sentiments are not universal, though, particularly for coaches who are less likely to go on deep postseason runs.
Butler head coach Kyle Shondell, for example, quote-tweeted Fisher’s reported comments and “respectfully” said the recommendation “benefits the VAST majority” of teams that do not reach the second weekend of the NCAA tournament.
That’s the inherent challenge when scheduling a portal window when some teams’ seasons end on Selection Sunday in late November and others’ seasons end with the Final Four in the third weekend of December.
“Everybody’s still trying to figure it out,” Sheffield said. “I hope there’s still time on the clock for us to move ours back after the championship.”
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin’s Kelly Sheffield takes issue with volleyball transfer-portal window