Star Utah Valley Guard Dominick Nelson Has Entered Transfer Portal
Mar 25, 2025, 11:38 AM
Photo courtesy of Tanner Tripp, KSL Sports.
OREM, Utah- Monday marked the opening of the transfer portal across college basketball, and a record number of student athletes declared their intentions to seek other opportunities on the first day, including a key piece of the Wolverines’ roster.
Dominick Nelson, who won WAC Player of the Year in his first year with Utah Valley after transferring from junior college, will leave the program for his senior year.
Utah Valley guard Dominick Nelson is entering the transfer portal, he told @On3sports.
The 6-5 junior from Miami averaged 14.4 points and 5.2 rebounds per game this season. https://t.co/P2CLLLO2iq pic.twitter.com/zyCxuvuSeI
— Joe Tipton (@TiptonEdits) March 24, 2025
Dominick Nelson At Utah Valley
The 6’5 guard transferred to Utah Valley from Polk State, a junior college in Central Florida, making the jump to Division I basketball for his junior year.
Nelson started all 34 games for the Wolverines this year and only played less than 20 minutes in one of them. On the season, Dominick averaged 14.4 points and 5.2 rebounds.
He scored a career-high 25 points three different times this season against UT Arlington, Seattle U, and Tarleton State. However, Dominick does most of his scoring around the basket and from the midrange. Over the course of the year, Nelson only took 87 three-pointers and only shot around 25% from beyond the arc.
Dominick was a key part of Utah Valley’s WAC Regular Season title and helped lead the Wolverines to their first undefeated home record in program history. He helped his team win 20 of their last 22 games of the season, but the squad came just seven points short of their first ever NCAA Tournament appearance against Grand Canyon in the WAC Championship,
Nelson’s likely final game in a Utah Valley uniform came as the Wolverines bowed out of the NIT in the first round against San Francisco.
The Transfer Portal
There have been two major contributing factors to the state of college athletics when it comes to the astronomical number of players hitting the transfer portal.
The first was the implementation of Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) in 2021, which allowed college athletes the ability to profit off their personal brand legally for the first time. The second factor was a new transfer rule passed by the NCAA last year that gave a transferring player immediate eligibility at their new stop, as opposed to having to wait a year to start play.
Athletes’ ability to get paid paired with instant eligibility with a new team after transferring have bred a wild landscape of bidding wars between institutions for athletes, players suiting up for a new team every year, tampering mid-season, and so on.
The loose rules from the NCAA that don’t require contracts between players and their schools, and little oversight from the league have caused an extremely unstable and unpredictable system where entire rosters are flipped and reconstructed each year. Many mid-major programs have suffered from instability as their top players are leaving after a short period of time with the program.
For some players, transferring means true progression to a bigger opportunity or more playing time with a team that fits their style, but for others, it comes down to where they will be able to make the most money.
College athletes cannot be criticized for seeking a life-changing payday. For many, they will support their families with the money they make from playing college sports. The issue comes with the system that is fostering such chaos.
According to 247sports.com, more than 2,000 student-athletes entered the transfer portal last year, but that number might be easily surpassed in 2025.
Some of the numbers being thrown out on some of the players in the portal are just stupid. Kids are asking for crazy amounts of money. And they’re getting it.
One player who earned 50k last season (and was a fine player last year) was just offered over a million by a B10…
— Scott Garrard (@ScottyGZone) March 25, 2025
