Near the end of this past season, Ryan Odom went to talk to Jairus Lyles about next season. The UMBC men’s basketball coach knew Lyles would be the team’s leading returning scorer, and knew Lyles, a fourth-year junior guard set to graduate this spring, had one more year of eligibility remaining. This made Odom hopeful. This made him anxious.

More than 800 Division I players changed schools going into the 2016-17 season, a record number. On the transfer market, Lyles would be coveted, a no-assembly-required kind of player, the rare low-major star who could go anywhere without sitting out a year. What made him valuable to the Retrievers would also make him attractive to any program with an unclaimed scholarship.

“I think there’s a lot of kids ... that it’s like a foregone conclusion: ‘Well, if you get into your fifth year, you have to leave,’?” Odom said recently in a telephone interview. “Like, ‘What do you mean you’re staying?’ Well, no. We’re going to think through this thing and figure out what’s best. And he certainly did that.”

After the season, UMBC’s best in nearly a decade, player and coach met again. They reviewed their year together, Odom’s first as coach. Lyles, a Silver Spring native who had relocated closer to home after his freshman season at Virginia Commonwealth, told Odom he was staying in Catonsville. They hugged.

“A little moment,” Lyles called it, and a win for the Retrievers. The so-called “up-transfer” culture of college basketball, where an ever-growing haul of low- and mid-major players is shipping off to higher levels, had spared Odom this offseason. For a while anyway, he could put off the question Mount St. Mary’s coach Jamion Christian and dozens of others like him now face this offseason: What do you do when your best players leave at the worst possible time?

“There’s certainly some success stories, and I think it goes both ways,” Odom said of up-transfers. “But there’s also some situations where a kid ends up making a change like that, and it doesn’t go like he thinks it will. It can impact the player. It can certainly impact the program that he’s leaving.”

There might be no program this offseason as adversely affected as Christian’s Mountaineers. Odom likened the up-transfer decision-making process to what an NBA draft prospect faces; in that case, even John Calipari would have a tough time replacing what Mount St. Mary’s lost in a matter of weeks.

Without a senior in the starting lineup, the Mount won the Northeast Conference regular-season and tournament titles this past season. After a First Four win in the NCAA tournament, the team hung with No. 1 overall seed Villanova for a half before a 20-point loss in the Round of 64. “The gap is really closing,” Christian said afterward of the sport’s haves and have-nots.

And then he lost much of what he had. In late April, Mount St. Mary’s sophomore guard Elijah Long (John Carroll), the team’s leader in points and assists, was granted his release from the program. (He decided on Texas and coach Shaka Smart, who hired Christian as an assistant at VCU in 2011).

Two weeks later, two more starters, freshman guard Miles Wilson (Mount Saint Joseph) and redshirt sophomore center Mawdo Sallah, announced they were transferring. Seldom-used reserves Charles Glover and Randy Miller Jr. (Mount Saint Joseph) also have left Emmitsburg.

In all, underclassman departures will have accounted for the loss of more than half of the team’s scoring. Such is life at Division I’s lower levels, Christian knows. Win games, and you risk losing players.

“When people commit here to play for us, I tell their families I’m making a commitment to make sure I take care of their son, and I make a strong commitment to do that,” Christian said. “I believe, even when they come in and they ask to transfer for whatever reason, my job is still to see them through this process, try to make sure they end up with the right people, that their next journey is as good or better as the one here. Because if they leave here and they have a bad experience, then what was the point?”

Still, he had said earlier, times have changed. When Christian played at Mount St. Mary’s in the early 2000s, “transfer” was taboo. “It meant that you had a problem with the coaching staff,” he said. Plus, who wanted to sit out a year under NCAA rules?

Now the stigma has lessened and accommodations for transfers have improved. Modern-day student-athletes, more empowered than those in previous generations, know their ties to a school can be cut as easily as a coach’s. Regimented strength and conditioning programs and offseason workouts offer players in a sit-out year all the benefits of a redshirt year.

Even the NCAA’s 2006 rule change, granting a transfer immediate eligibility elsewhere if they have graduated and seek a graduate degree in a major not offered by their current school, has had the unintended consequence of encouraging player movement.

“It’s totally changed,” Odom said of the low-volume transfer market that existed when his father, Dave, was coaching Wake Forest in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

As of Tuesday, over 575 Division I players had announced they were transferring, according to verbalcommits.com, with many more likely to follow suit. Low- and mid-major schools are suffering disproportionately. A recent Sports Illustrated analysis found that the number of up-transfers rose 225 percent from 2012 to last offseason, when 91 players left for “distinctly higher levels” of play.

Transfer traffic goes two ways, and Towson, in particular, has benefited from the arrival of former high-major recruits Arnaud William Adala Moto (Wake Forest) and Deshaun Morman (Cincinnati). But anecdotally, Christian said, “You don’t see as many transfers into our league as you do going out.”

An offseason exodus like the Mount’s can be as galling as a 3 a.m. fire alarm. Lyles’ return was important for Odom not only because it answered one of the game’s most fundamental questions — Who can go get buckets for us? — but also because it didn’t mean having to ask another one: Who’s still out there who can help? Most incoming recruiting classes are, by now, long since finalized. The players still available are available for a reason.

“A guy’s averaging 19 [points] a game, or whatever it is,” Odom said, “that’s not an easy thing, certainly at the lower levels, to replace a player of that caliber.”

While some coaches have begun to fight the transfer war with counterintelligence — Sports Illustrated reported that more and more sports information directors have been told to stop listing redshirt years in media guides, so as to discourage interest from other schools — their best hope ultimately lies in relationships. And not always their own.

Lyles said he “wanted to grow” with his team and coaching staff another year. He valued the bond he had forged with UMBC president Freeman Hrabowski. “I think that can help down the future with me, whether it be life after basketball or continuing to play basketball,” Lyles said.

Towson coach Pat Skerry hired Adala Moto’s brother, Parfait Bitee, who played at Rhode Island when Skerry worked as an assistant coach there, to an off-court coaching role.

Christian strives to show his players “love and compassion and empathy,” hoping they realize his lessons about “how to grow up and be a man” require a four-year plan.

When plans change, it’s back to the drawing board, to the recruiting trail. Each Mount St. Mary’s team’s playing style is tailored to the roster’s abilities; Christian’s humble goal is to maximize his players’ talent. Sometimes that means having to settle for ultimately losing them.

“I have a lot of faith in our program because, honestly,” Christian said, “we’ve done this time and time again.”

jshaffer@baltsun.com

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