UWGB junior forward Elijah Jones enters NCAA transfer portal after leading the team in rebounding and blocks
GREEN BAY – Sundance Wicks had several quotable moments during his first season as the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay men’s basketball coach.
His views on the NCAA transfer portal might be at the top. He likes to refer to the Book of Portal when talking about it.
“The portal giveth,” Wicks will tell you. “And the portal taketh away.”
It has taketh away to start the Phoenix’s offseason after junior forward Elijah Jones entered his name into the portal, which officially opened Monday.
The 6-foot-7 Jones enjoyed a successful season in his only campaign at UWGB after helping lead John A. Logan College in Illinois to the NJCAA Division I national championship in 2023.
He started 29 of 31 contests for the Phoenix and led the team with 6.7 rebounds per game and 19 blocks. Jones was fourth in scoring (8.1 ppg), second in shooting percentage (59.3%) and third in minutes (24.7 mpg).
Jones has one season of eligibility remaining.
He did not respond to a text message seeking comment about his decision.
Jones spent the first two seasons of his collegiate career at Southern Indiana, which transitioned from DII to DI in 2022 but isn’t eligible to play in the NCAA Tournament until 2026-27.
He averaged 4.7 points and 4 rebounds as a sophomore before leaving to join John A. Logan, where he enjoyed the best season of his career, averaging 8.1 points, 6.7 rebounds and shooting 60.6% while starting all 35 games.
Jones committed to UWGB in late April last year in what was the best week of the offseason following Wicks' hire a month earlier.
Wicks not only landed Jones during that time but also star guard Noah Reynolds, who was one of the best players in the Horizon League as a junior and voted newcomer of the year.
Reynolds and Jones were two significant factors in helping UWGB go 18-14 one year after going 3-29.
Jones was confident he could help UWGB with a quick turnaround under Wicks, and he was right.
“People said it might take a couple years, but I feel like the coaches have assembled a good group of guys that could really reestablish Green Bay basketball this year and the year after that,” Jones said after committing. “Coach did a great job of recruiting players.”
One year later, Jones is gone.
Welcome to life in the transfer portal era.
One of Wicks’ greatest strengths, along with the assistant coaching staff he has assembled, is selling their vision to potential recruits.
Finding the next Jones — as well as Clarence Cummings III, who also entered the portal after two seasons with the Phoenix — is a process that never ends.
“Recruiting, in my opinion, is identifying the ability in somebody that maybe they don’t have quite yet but you know it will translate at some point,” Wicks said last month. “A lot of that process is the work the young man puts in.
“It’s recruitment and development, and then it’s retention. Hopefully, what you see in this process is that if you recruit and can identify talent and then you can develop new talent and then you can retain your talent, at some point that develops a program that is sustainable over time.”
If not for that pesky portal.
“That’s the beauty of this process that I love so much that I think has been taken away from the transfer portal,” Wicks said. “There are still really good coaches out there who recruit and identify first. Recruit, develop, and then when they do that, because of the portal, they don’t get to retain or don’t have the opportunity to retain.
“That’s where the fans have missed out. That’s what the (UWGB) women’s program has that is so special. They get to see these players develop over four years, and they don’t get attached to their abilities as a basketball player, but they grow attached to the human element. The things that make them so special. Their quirks. Their uniqueness. Their authenticity.”
UWGB won’t play in postseason tournament
UWGB won't play in the NIT, CBI or CIT tournaments, which mean its season officially is done.
The team wasn’t extended an invite to participate in any of the tournaments, although even if it had been, it still might have opted not to accept. For a tournament like the CBI, schools pay a fee to participate that can run almost $30,000.
UWGB has not played in a postseason tournament since 2019, when it finished runner-up in the CIT.
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: UWGB basketball's top rebounder Elijah Jones enters transfer portal
