UMass To Prioritize High School Recruiting Under Harasymiak
Despite the amount of Transfer Portal additions since his hiring, look for UMass head coach Joe Harasymiak to make high school recruiting the priority.
Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman has a motto when it comes to building his roster in South Bend.
“We’re going to major in high school recruiting and minor in the Portal.”
In his first few months in Amherst, it may seem that first-year UMass head coach Joe Harasymiak is working on his Transfer Portal Thesis, but in reality, Harasymiak and his staff are aiming to be aligned with Freeman’s philosophy.
The very nature of the task he was given - turning one of the sport’s worst programs into a successful one fast - required Harasymiak to utilize the Portal heavily in order to upgrade the roster.
For someone who doesn’t plan on using the Portal much in the future, Harasymiak sure is good at it. Together with his staff, he managed to add dozens of transfer prospects to the roster within a month of his hiring, most of which will play relevant roles in the fall.
That kind of turnover is necessary in order to make a program that has won a total of eight games over the past six seasons competitive immediately.
But that doesn’t mean it’s a trend that will be repeated in the future.
Expect the Minutemen to be more intentional in the Portal moving forward, closer to what this Spring Portal period has looked like for UMass.
The Minutemen have added nine players via the Portal this spring and are still in the running for a few more. But the approach has been much more precise than the first round of transfer additions.
UMass is looking mostly - but not only - for specific players who will upgrade the roster this coming fall. That’s something every program serious about winning will do each year.
Three of Marcus Freeman’s last four starting quarterbacks have come to South Bend via the Portal along with selective additions who helped the Irish reach the National Championship this past season. But the core of Freeman’s program is built around high school recruiting.
That is exactly what Harasymiak is going to do.
“We want a high school recruit,” Harasymiak said earlier this spring. “A high school recruit is where you develop your culture. That's your Draft. We've got to draft.
“We've got to have the farm system ready and then the Portal will be used as some free agency moving forward to see where we have some holes, see where we need to get more athletic, bigger, all those things that go into it. That's how we're going to plan our approach to that.”
And as with most things so far with Harasymiak, virtually everything he preaches aligns.
One thing he has repeatedly hammered home is the idea that changing the culture in Amherst is paramount over everything, even winning…at least in the short term.
There are plenty of benefits to prioritizing the Portal over high school prospects, but ensuring a positive, sustainable culture is not one of them.
You’ll see some programs leaning into the Portal for roster makeup year after year, similar to the way John Calipari embraced one-and-done prospects when he was at Kentucky long before the other perennial powers did the same.
Indiana head coach Curt Cignetti used the Portal in his first year in Bloomington to help the Hoosiers reach the College Football Playoff and he’s going back to it again this offseason.
Bill Belichick has said he too views the Portal as similar to NFL free agency and believes all of his experience in The League will give him an advantage in applying his knowledge now that he’s the head coach at North Carolina.
They’re betting that maximizing the roster’s talent year in and year out will matter more than creating a culture within the program.
They’re also minimizing the importance of development within a program, since many of the players they plan on using in years to come will be getting developed elsewhere anyway.
That couldn’t be further from the vision Harasymiak has for UMass.
He plans on majoring in high school recruiting and has put together a staff that doesn’t just embrace the jobs of evaluating prospects and developing players, they truly crave those aspects.
“We're going to get these high school kids in and develop them and we're going to build a foundation,” one source told Minuteman Command this week. “We're here to build a foundation both on the field and through our culture with what we're trying to do. You can't do that by living in the Portal.
“The Portal isn't going to be what we do moving forward. High school recruiting is the Draft. The Portal is free agency.”
And that’s why as satisfied as the staff is with the players they’ve added via the Portal in December and this spring, they’re truly fired up about a kid like Dave Chiavegato, a 2026 Massachusetts safety who committed to the Minutemen earlier this week.
It’ll be over a year before Chiavegato will even be eligible to play in a game at UMass.
Still, one source described his commitment as “massive” for the program as the Minutemen strive to build the foundation of their roster with the best players in and around the state.
Harasymiak isn’t here to patch the program together and mask its flaws. He’s here to build it the right way, from the bottom up.
Thankfully, Harasymiak didn’t spend too much time on that Transfer Portal Thesis because it’s more likely to acquire dust than to be put into practice.
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