Two more high school seniors have verbally committed to join the Kent State women next fall.

Both good-shooting guards, they are:

• Jenna Batsch, a 6-footer from Loveland High School, about 25 miles from Cincinnati. She shot 48% from the field last season and was third-team all-district.
• Elena Maier, who is 5-9 and from Waunakee High School, about 13 miles outside of Madison, Wisconsin. She shot 52% from the field and made her all-conference team.

Both announced their commitments on Twitter this month. Batsch and Maier are Kent State’s third and fourth verbal commitments from the high school class of 2021. KSU coaches can’t comment on high school players until they have signed a letter of intent to enroll. The first day for that is Nov. 13.

Unless an underclassman leaves the team, Batsch and Maier finish filling KSU’s available 15 scholarships for 2021-22.

Batsch averaged 11 points and three steals a game last season on one of the best teams in her high school’s history. Loveland was 22-4 overall and won its conference with a 13-1 record. The team had three Division I commits — Batsch, guard Kate Garry, who is now a freshman at Akron, and second-team all-Stater Jillian Hayes, now a freshman at Cincinnati.

Prep Girls Hoops called Batsch “long and athletic and able to get to the basket to score.” Her video highlights show strong drives to the basketball and good defense. She also had offers from Quinnipiac, Cleveland State and Florida International. Here’s link to Batsch’s highlights.

Maier averaged 14.7 points, 4.7 rebounds, 2.4 assists and 1.5 steals on a team that went 19-6. In her sophomore year, she averaged 12.9 points a game. Her highlights show a player who can score from many different spots on the floor. Maier’s shooting percentage improved almost 11 points between her sophomore and junior years. Maier’s highlights.

Kent State’s earlier commitments came from:

• 6-3 post player Bridget Dunn of Carmel, Indiana. She averaged 12.3 points and 9.9 rebounds as a junior and made the Indiana basketball coaches association’s 15-member all-junior team in 2020. Her highlights. Link to story about Dunn’s commitment.
• 5-8 guard Lexy Linton of Mt. Holly, New Jersey. She averaged just under 15 points a game in both her sophomore and junior seasons. Linton’s highlights. Link to story about Linton’s commitment (it’s second item).

(I add Dunn’s and Linton’s highlights because I hadn’t posted them earlier. In fact, I’ve never posted recruit highlights before. But why not?)

The four-person recruiting class is Kent State’s largest in three years. The new players will replace seniors Monique Smith and Margaux Eibel, neither of whom is expected to start this season.

Aside from Dunn, the new class doesn’t have the all-state credentials the last three KSU classes had. We’ll have to wait and see how they do as seniors.

In any year, you really don’t know how good any class is until they arrive on campus. In this COVID recruiting year, when coaches weren’t allowed to recruit off-campus and recruits couldn’t visit colleges, that’s especially true.

Kent State will be looking for a lot of players next year. Five players — including projected starters Mariah Modkins, Lindsey Thall and Linsey Marchese — all graduate in 2022.

17 months after graduation, Alexa Golden becomes an assistant coach.

New transfer rule likely to start in summer

It looks very likely that the NCAA’s long-debated one-time transfer rule will start next summer.

The rule would allow athletes to transfer schools once in their careers without having to sit out a season. Most sports already allow that; the new rule would expand that to men’s and women’s basketball, football and men’s ice hockey.

The NCAA’s Division I Council formally introduced the measure at a meeting last week. It’s likely to be voted on in January. The rule almost went into effect last summer, but the NCAA decided that with all the stresses the COVID-19 pandemic was causing, it didn’t need another change.

Here’s how the transfer rule would work:

Basketball and football players will have to notify their current schools by May 1 that they intend to transfer. The deadline would be extended until July 1 if the team’s head coach leaves or a player’s scholarship is not renewed. If players miss the deadline, they could still transfer but would have to sit out a season.

Players who want to transfer have to leave their old school academically eligible.

A school cannot block a player’s transfer to a specific school; in the past, some teams haven’t approved transfers to another school in the same conference or a big rival.

The rule would go into effect Aug. 1. I’d assume a player can verbally commit to a transfer earlier but would’t be able to enroll at the new school until then.

The new rule would essentially end the graduate transfer, where players could transfer and be immediately eligible after they finished their undergrad degree. It also will cut way down on hardship waivers, in which players can ask the NCAA to approve immediate eligibility. It’s usually requested for “family reasons,” but coaches have complained it’s been applied unevenly.

The rule that required transfers to sit out a year has been in effect since the 1960s. In the last 10 or 15 years, critics have argued that if coaches can jump from school to school, players should also. And as the NCAA loosened the transfer rule, the graduate transfer and hardship waivers made fairness difficult. Many graduate transfers also never finished their master’s degrees.

People also have pointed out that in most other sports, players have been able to transfer and be immediately eligible. There hasn’t been wholesale turnover on baseball and gymnastics teams.

What’s the rule change mean for Kent State and the MAC?

Some have said that mid-majors like Kent State will become nothing more than farm teams for the power conferences, that the underclass stars of the MAC will quickly move on to the Big Ten or ACC.

But movement can go the other way. The Kent State women have picked up two transfers from Big Ten teams in the last two years. 6-4 Linsey Marchese from Indiana is likely to play a big role for the team this season. Eastern Michigan got transfer Areanna Combs from Oklahoma State in 2019. She was second-team all-MAC last season.

The rule change, I think, does mean we’re going to see a lot more transfers and roster churn.

But the timing is complicated. Most teams sign the bulk of their freshman recruits in November. The second signing period for freshmen is in April. A coaches may have filled their roster only to discover that one of their players is unexpectedly transferring. Or they have an opportunity to add a contributor to their squad — if they still have a scholarship available.

Current players get an extra year of eligibility

Another NCAA rule change approved last week allows winter sports athletes an additional year of eligibility.

That means that someone like Central Michigan’s Michaela Kelly, last year’s player of the year in the MAC as a junior, could be eligible to come back for another year after this season. If I’m reading the rule right, it also means a freshman like Kent State’s Casey Santoro will have five years of eligibility

The idea is to keep COVID pandemic from costing players a season. The NCAA had previously given the extra year to spring and fall athletes.

The rule will create complications.

First, the NCAA limits the number of scholarships a team is allowed to give. For women’s basketball, that’s 15.

The NCAA hasn’t said yet whether it will increase that number in light of the additional eligibility rule.

If it doesn’t, things will get messy. What happens if a team has four seniors but has recruited four freshmen to replace them. If a senior comes back, would a freshman lose her scholarship?

If the NCAA expands the roster, there are still problems.

If those seniors are still around, the freshmen have to compete with them for playing time. That may mean some team members very unhappy on the bench.

Can schools afford the additional scholarships on an expanded roster? Loss of revenue due to the pandemic has hit just about every athletic department in the country, from the Kent States to the Ohio States. Some schools have cut the number of scholarships they offer to save money.

Wisconsin last year told its spring-sport seniors that there wouldn’t be a place for them in 2021.

I would think seniors like them could transfer. Other players could choose to transfer. Maybe Kelly would like to play her second senior season at Michigan State or Michigan.

Some players, of course, will want to graduate and move on with their lives. Some of the best will turn pro. But some coaches may have to tell players they’ve coached for four years that there is no place for them on the roster.

The effect to the extra eligibility could ripple on for four years, until next year’s freshmen graduate.

COVID-19 has messed up a lot of things. It pales before 220,000 deaths, but you can add college roster management to the list.