I’ll never forget the feeling I had sitting in the Pyramid at Long Beach State in January of 2016 covering a men’s volleyball match against Cal Baptist. The Beach were rolling out three true freshmen starters that night in TJ DeFalco, Josh Tuaniga, and Kyle Ensing. They came in with a ton of hype, topping every recruiting list in the country, and that night they looked the part. As I was watching them dominate Cal Baptist, I was filled with excitement—I couldn’t believe that I got to cover those guys for four years.
It was like being a kid on Christmas morning, if Christmas morning was the start of 48 months of opening presents. Sure enough, over the next four years that trio would prove to be the best recruiting class in school history in any sport, winning two national titles and piling up three National Player of the Year honors among countless other accolades. All these years later, I still remember that feeling of excitement and anticipation on night one, knowing that Long Beach was going to have the best team in the country for four years.
That feeling is, to put it simply, endangered at the mid-major level of college sports, if it’s not already extinct. I covered a Long Beach State men’s basketball game early this season and was impressed with Gavin Sykes, the Beach’s star freshman. He had a sensational game against Montana State, putting up 24 points.
I wanted to have that same feeling I had watching the volleyball stars in their debut—that excitement for the future. Instead, I had a different feeling, one echoed by a senior Long Beach State staffer that I walked up the steps with to the postgame press conference.
“I hate that I see a game like that and I’m thinking, ‘How will we be able to afford to keep the guy?’” that staffer said. I had, of course, been thinking the same thing.
Sure enough, the transfer portal officially opens Tuesday, and Gavin Sykes has already announced his intention to enter it, along with Petar Majstorovic, Dallas Washington, and Isaiah Lewis. The same thing is happening to the Beach women’s basketball team, as leading scorer JaQuoia Jones-Brown announced on social media that she’ll depart as well, along with the likes of Christy Reynoso, Lauren Cummings, and Haley Wright.
In all the Beach men’s team will lose the Big West Freshman of the Year in Sykes, as well as their only other All-Big West honoree in Majstorovic; those two plus Washington and Lewis account for 42.6 points per game of the team’s 74.8 ppg average. With Jones-Brown also leaving, the school will not return any all-conference honorees from either hoops program.
It puts fans in a difficult spot, coming off of a difficult season that saw the teams go a combined 15-47 overall. Instead of Beach fans being excited that a young, talented core took their lumps this year with an eye towards a bright future, they all know they’re back to square one. And square one is about as far from Christmas morning as it comes.
The Beach find themselves in a new world, without the coffers of NIL money required to compete even with other mid-majors. One associate head coach at a program that made a deep NCAA Tournament run told me that he wanted to apply for the Long Beach State job when it came open, but that the lack of NIL money (even compared to other relatively cash-strapped Big West schools) kept him from even throwing his name in the hat.
I don’t count myself among the college sports fans or media opposed to the new NIL world. I’ve known and covered so many kids who’ve been able to get (legally) paid over the last few years that I could never be anything but happy to see them get a cut of the money they’re earning their universities. But those players compete for power-conference schools that make millions off television deals and other revenue streams—money that is not now (and has never previously been) flowing through Long Beach State.
I do believe it’s still possible to compete in the “Olympic sports” that have always been Long Beach State’s heritage and history. The men’s volleyball team is currently in the hunt for a second straight national title and managed to sign the biggest name in the sport last year in Moni Nikolov despite better-funded competitors like UCLA and USC wanting him as well.
But the truth is that Long Beach State fans should be savoring the sports like men’s volleyball and water polo that are competing at a national level, and perhaps acknowledge that a tough time is ahead in sports like men’s and women’s basketball. Unless I hit big on the lottery or another NIL-flush benefactor appears, there may be some choppy times ahead. Worse, the emotional connection that so many Long Beach State fans have loved over the years will become harder to form as well, with talented players hearing from their agents a month into the season that they’re definitely going to get paid bigger somewhere other than Long Beach.
I’m not sure what the next steps into this new world look like—but I’m a lot less excited about what’s ahead of me and our local university than I was in 2016.
