A week after playing in just its second NCAA Tournament, Saint Francis’ decision to reclassify its athletic program to Division III and join the Presidents’ Athletic Conference in 2026-27 has sparked a mass exodus of men’s basketball players.
Six more from the Northeast Conference school, including leading scorer Riley Parker, entered their names in the NCAA transfer portal on Wednesday, according to national recruiting site verbalcommits.com, bringing the Red Flash total to 12.
The website reported that more than 1,300 names were in the portal during the first three days of a 30-day window designed to provide players an opportunity to choose another school.
Parker, a 6-foot-2 junior point guard, averaged 13.4 points per game and finished with a team-high 112 assists this season for Saint Francis. He scored 12 points in the Red Flash’s 70-68 loss to Alabama State in the NCAA First Four on March 18 in Dayton, Ohio.
“We’re on the losing end of the transfer portal,” Saint Francis president the Very Rev. Malachi Van Tassell told the Altoona Mirror. “You know we can’t compete with NIL (name, image, likeness), so those things really kind of forced us to make the decision. Not that it made the decision easy, but those were the factors that caused us to say we have to do this for the good of the student-athletes.”
Others among the latest portal entrants from Saint Francis were 6-6 junior guard Chris Moncrief, a Turtle Creek native and Kiski School graduate; sophomore guards Bobby Rosenberger III and Ace Talbert, who missed much of the season with an injury; freshman guard Jeremy Clayville; and 6-9 junior center Gestin Liberis.
Elsewhere, Robert Morris lost its third player, according to verbalcommits.com, when little-used forward Antallah Sandlin’El joined two of the team’s top players — 6-9 sophomore forward Alvaro Folgueiras and 6-7 junior guard/forward Amarion Dickerson — in the portal.
Sandlin’El, a 6-8, 205-pound redshirt freshman, played in just nine games this season for the Colonials, averaging 4.4 points and 2.0 rebounds per game.
And on a day when West Virginia announced it had hired North Texas’ Ross Hodge to replace Darian DeVries as coach, two more players — sophomore guard Sencire Harris and sophomore forward Amani Hasberry — were added to the portal, bringing the Mountaineers’ total to five.
Among those entering the portal earlier this week was senior guard/forward Tucker DeVries, who was expected to transfer to Indiana, which hired Darian DeVries, his father, as coach.
Tucker DeVries was averaging 14.9 points and 4.9 rebounds in eight games before undergoing surgery for upper-body injury that forced him to miss the rest of the season.