Arkansas immediately turns full attention to talent acquisition per transfer portal

BY DUDLEY E. DAWSON

FAYETTEVILLE – While Arkansas baseball fans can lament what might have been at the College World Series, the Razorback coaches don’t have that luxury.

Arkansas head coach Dave Van Horn and his staff must turn the page and continue the transfer portal recruiting process to replenish talent that won’t be back from this season’s 50-15 squad.

“…You’re always looking to the future,” Van Horn said when asked about recruiting following Wednesday night’s 6-5 season-ending loss to LSU. “You’re always
looking a year down the road, two years down the road.

“And we’ve been on the phone a lot up here (in Omaha) with kids that we’re trying to get to come visit us when our season’s over. So we’ll be on the phone probably tomorrow (Thursday) getting them lined up.”

Arkansas got to this year’s CWS in large part because of landing the nation’s No. 2 transfer portal recruiting class last summer according to Baseball America.

Outfielders Charles Davalan and Logan Maxwell, infielder Cam Kozeal and pitchers Zach Root and Landon Beidelschies were among key contributors the Razorbacks landed out of the transfer portal for the 2025 roster.

College baseball recruiting is continual process throughout the year per Van Horn.

“I mean, in the back of your head,
you’re always thinking about next year throughout the season, with recruiting, who you have in your program, what are you going to do when the season’s over,” Van Horn
“You’re going to have the conversation with players. You just learn how to do it. It’s just what you do. You start to fight to get back here.

“Every time we have recruits in
the fall, and then you’re thinking about when they get here,
down the road and how that’s going to fill in there.

“Then we lose one in the (Major League Baseball) draft. We lose that one in the draft. We
get one out of the portal, and here we go.”

Van Horn and his staff had already added two portal pitching pick ups – Little Rock right hander Jackson Wells and Vanderbilt left hander Ethan McElvain.

Arkansas has also signed 19 high school and junior college players – the nation’s No. 4 2025 recruiting class per Perfect Game.

Next season’s NCAA college baseball roster swill be different in that while all players will be on scholarship – instead of dividing 11.7 – but coaches will only be able to have 36 players from the time school starts.

That’s different from being able to have 50 or so on campus to start the school year.

“Then when school starts, that’s what you’ve got,” Van Horn said. “And you hope you’ve got enough. You hope they like each other. You hope they like to play.

“There’s so many kids nowadays (in the transfer portal), you don’t bring a lot of freshmen in, you have until their third year, you develop them. It’s just different now. You either have to embrace it (portal recruiting) or do something else. I’m embracing it.”

Van Horn stressed it has to be the right type of player for Arkansas.

“First off, as a coach, you’ve got to get the right players,” Van Horn said. “Yeah, the talent’s out there and the experience, but you’ve got to get the right ones. You’ve got to get the right ones that really care.”

Van Horn admits to having mixed emotions on the transfer portal.

“The transfer portal is tough,” Van Horn continued. “I have mixed emotions on it. First off, as a coach, you recruit a kid. You’d like to keep them in your program, play some as a freshman, probably start as a sophomore, big-time player as a junior, signs a contract.

“That’s the way it used to be. In our league, most of the leagues now, they’re old. They’re old. Hard to play as a freshman. You’ve got good freshmen that go to other schools, smaller schools, they get it right and then we get them.”

Van Horn knew that he and his staff had to get on board with the changing college landscape right away four years ago.

“And, yeah, it’s very difficult, but this is the way I talked to our coaches about it four years ago,” Van Horn said. “We’ve either got to embrace it or we need to get a different job. And that’s what we did. We said, okay, these are the rules, that is what we’ve got to do. That’s what we did.”

Photo by John D. James