Dylan Lolofie faced the Transfer Portal head-on and ended up on top
By Estella Weeks
Dylan Lolofie hung up the phone with the Weber State University athletics compliance director. She had requested her name be put in the NCAA Transfer Portal. Having nothing other than “faith,” she had taken the first step in leaving her full-ride tennis scholarship at Weber for a chance to play at another school.
Dylan Lolofie is part of the 1.5 percent of female athletes who play tennis at the NCAA Division I collegiate level. After two successful seasons with Weber State University, her head coach, Ruth Ann Allen, announced her transfer to the University of Utah. Lolofie, who admired Allen and wanted to continue being coached by her, made the decision to enter the transfer portal.
The semester was starting in a couple of months, and she was unsure if her nearly finished nursing program credits would transfer, but she successfully navigated the transition and now plays at the U.
“Entering the transfer portal ... is a risk because you don’t know if you're going to get picked up or not,” Lolofie said. “In my situation. I had a lot of faith that I would end up where I'm supposed to and now, I'm really happy about it.”
The NCAA transfer portal was released in 2018 as a software tool that would manage the transfer of Division 1 student-athletes. The portal took a once-complicated paperwork process and digitized it. It doesn't come without widespread criticism, however, in regards to established norms of team loyalty at the collegiate level.
Lolofie’s biggest pull in the sport, she said, were the friendships she built through tennis so when her head coach left to coach at the University of Utah and half her team wouldn't be returning the following season due to graduation of medical hardship; it made Lolofie rethink everything.
Allen, who has coached at the college level for more than two decades, recalled a time when transferring among schools would set an athlete back regarding their eligibility. After the transfer portal was introduced, athletes were not required to tell their coaches they were transferring or needing their permission to do so. Allen believes that in the case of transferring to a different school every year, it can get ‘out of hand’ for the player and the team.
“'I'm not sure we're teaching student-athletes how to handle situations, how to face conflict [or] work through coaching differences,” she said. “So, in that regard, I don't like it. I'm not sure we're setting them up for what could happen in the real world, where you have to work through things.”
Long before Lolofie played at the collegiate level, her love for tennis began at 7 years old when she signed up for a tennis program in her hometown of Salt Lake City. Over the next 13 years, Lolofie and her family intertwined their lives emotionally and financially with the sport. These sacrifices paid off, she said, when she was recruited in high school and offered a full-ride scholarship to attend Weber State, a school that competed in the Big Sky Conference.
Lolofie helped her team make history in her freshman year by winning the Big Sky Championship in 2023, breaking a 23-year losing streak for Weber.
“It was probably one of the happiest moments of my life,” Lolofie said.
The following year, the team fell short of the title and lost its final matchup. Lolofie didn't get to finish her singles match, but it didn't matter because she had built lifelong friendships and memories.
Navigating the Transfer Portal
According to a 2022 NCAA study, 57 percent of student-athletes who entered the transfer portal were able to attend another Division 1 school. This means 43 percent or about one in every 2.3 students either exited from the portal, did not get picked up, or withdrew from their sport.
“I think entering the transfer portal definitely is a risk because you don't know if you're going to get picked up or not,” Lolofie said.
For head and assistant coaches who make roster decisions, utilizing the transfer portal when recruiting new talent can be risky according to Melissa Kopinski. She is the assistant head coach for the women’s tennis team at the U and worries about the intention and longevity of athletes who actively use the portal.
There are risks on both sides," she said. "We just have to make sure we do our homework,” Koinski said.
Coaches, she said, need to consider an athlete’s motive and whether they’ll be a good fit on the team and the program’s culture. In 2021, the implementation of NIL – or name, image, and likeness – allowed student-athletes to legally make money off their fame. NIL laws are decided statewide and only 29 of the 50 states have signed the policies into law. Those policies that allow students to make money from their collegiate careers increase the amount of student-athletes wanting to transfer, depending on whether they can earn more revenue at another school in a state where the NIL was signed into law.
“We need to dot our I’s and cross our T’s,” she added.
Allen was announced as the new head coach for the women’s tennis team in July of 2024 and shortly after had a video interview with Bill Riley discussing her new role. In that interview, Allen expressed the current conflict of finding more girls to join the team.
“So I reached out to her and told her that I was in the portal and then we went from there,” Lolofie said.
Lolofie was picked up by the U in early September 2024 and has been taking online classes toward a bachelor’s in health and society at the U and plans on finishing her associate’s degree in nursing from Weber during the summer of 2025.
When she entered her name into the transfer portal, Lolofie said she didn't know what would happen. But she became part of the 57 percent of student-athletes whose transfers went through.
Alongside her new teammates and coaching staff, Lolofie wonders how she got so lucky to have the experience she has.
“Ruthanne is one of the biggest role models in my life. She's had the biggest impact on me not only on the court but also as a person. She treats us as more than tennis players. She always makes it clear that we have so much in life ahead of us. It's a special dynamic what she brings and what our coaches Megan [Megan Dorny] and Mel [Melissa Kopinski] bring because they all contribute in different ways but they all push us to be stronger women,” Lolofie said.