Hanging out in Lindsay Gottlieb’s house in Mar Vista back in April, they both knew they were in the right place.
McKenzie Forbes and Kayla Padilla were nearing the end of their official visits to USC, discussing their options as graduate student-athletes in the transfer portal. Forbes was visibly excited; Padilla was more stoic. But both had made up their minds, and they were ready to share.
“Come on,” Forbes said, “let’s go do it at the same time.”
In the living room sat Gottlieb — head coach of USC women’s basketball — along with her husband and two children. Forbes’ parents and Padilla’s parents were also present, as was the rest of the USC women’s basketball team.
They talked to their families first, and then called Gottlieb over to officially commit to the Trojans together.
When Gottlieb broke the news to the rest of the team moments later, an impromptu dance party broke out.
“It was nice to commit in person and get that reaction from everyone just while we were there, versus going home and then calling,” Forbes said. “It just made it more fun.”
While Forbes and Padilla both say they’re ecstatic about where they ended up for their graduate year and final season of college basketball, the process of getting there wasn’t smooth.
The transfer portal is the Wild West of modern college athletics — an oft-taboo, mythicized topic for most. Many players don’t know what they’re getting themselves into when they decide to transfer, entering a cryptic database full of thousands competing for a slim number of coveted roster spots.
Plenty has been written about the effects of the transfer portal on the court or field, as evident in the numerous top transfer rankings for football, basketball and soccer. But much less is known about the process of transferring as a student-athlete. What are the eligibility requirements? How do student-athletes get recruited? What does the actual transfer portal even look like? Even as a student-athlete herself, Padilla had little idea what she was getting into as she entered the portal.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many student-athletes saw their seasons cut short, or even completely canceled. In response, the NCAA approved a rule change in 2021 that gave college athletes an extra year of eligibility, effectively ruling that seasons during the 2020-21 school year did not count against a student-athlete’s four years of eligibility.
This “COVID year,” as it’s come to be known, was a helpful addition for the majority of student-athletes. They could play an extra season while also earning a graduate degree, still on their athletic scholarship. It was especially valuable to Forbes and Padilla, two Ivy League women’s basketball players who weren’t able to play at all during 2020-21 because of the conference’s decision not to play any sports during that school year.
There was just one issue.
Graduate students are not allowed to play sports in the Ivy League.
So if Forbes and Padilla wanted that additional college season, they would have to find a new home to do so.
That’s where the transfer portal comes in. Granted, it’s easier to transfer as a graduate student. Players don’t have to worry about transferring credits to a new school in addition to their athletic abilities to a new team. However, there’s still a stigma attached to the transfer portal, despite the fact that many players, such as Forbes and Padilla, have no other choice in order to continue their athletic careers.
Taylor Bigby, a redshirt sophomore guard for USC, transferred from Oregon prior to the 2022-23 season and found the process to be stressful due to outside noise.
“I’m thinking about, ‘Well, what are people going to think of me?’” Bigby said. She described how many people — fans, media, even some coaches — look down on student-athletes who didn’t “pick the perfect situation” entering college and end up transferring. Common criticisms of the transfer portal are that athletes don’t learn to wait their turn or confront their problems.
But that’s not how Gottlieb operates her program. In fact, she’s brought in 11 transfers over the last two offseasons by making players like Bigby feel confident in their decision to switch schools. Despite their different backgrounds and paths to USC, many of these transfers have spoken to the importance of arriving alongside other transfers and sharing that experience together.
A native of Torrance, California, Kayla Padilla frequently made the 20-minute trip with her family to Galen Center to watch USC basketball growing up. Not highly recruited out of high school, the sharpshooting Padilla chose to attend Penn after failing to receive any Power Five offers. But after three record-setting seasons with the Quakers, in which she set multiple program records for 3-point shooting, Padilla said she was much more coveted as a grad transfer.
Padilla knew she would enter the transfer portal after her senior season but was still focused on completing the task at hand — making sure her career at Penn finished as smoothly as possible. However, when Penn made the trip to Galen Center last November for a non-conference matchup, Padilla couldn’t help but feel that the game was an audition for where she would play her final season. Though Padilla struggled in that matchup with USC — she missed all seven of her 3-point attempts — her overall body of work still spoke for itself as she was recruited by coaches, Gottlieb included.
Navigating the transfer portal itself wasn’t easy for Padilla. Information about the process is limited and can be hard to find, so many players have to pick the brains of others who have already gone through it to gain a better understanding.
“I asked my coach, ‘What goes on in the transfer portal?’ She was telling me how she checked it after we had practice, and 30 minutes later, there were like 1,000 more people in the transfer portal,” Padilla said. “I feel like there’s a lot of ways people can sort of get lost in this gigantic list.”
Padilla has friends from other schools who she said were overwhelmed by the portal, and it didn’t do them any good because of how crowded it was.
Luckily for Padilla, she was able to stick out to the coach of the school where she had wanted to end up since her childhood. Gottlieb, who was a player and student assistant at Brown in the late ‘90s, shares the same Ivy League roots as Padilla. She understood how Padilla’s Ivy League success could translate to the Power Five.
Padilla describes herself as a big family person as well, so USC’s proximity to home also made it an obvious choice. But there was still some uncertainty late in her transfer process.
Padilla was anxious about whether she was simply making her decision to be close to her family, so she was conscious of ensuring that she wasn’t just taking the easiest solution — she wanted to maximize every possible aspect of her decision-making process, from academics to athletics to family.
“USC proved itself to be a plus in every single thing I was looking for,” Padilla said. “It’s not just being home. It’s also going to one of the best business schools and being a part of a program that’s going to be highly ranked.”
In contrast to Padilla’s steadier rise, McKenzie Forbes’ journey to USC was a bumpier ride.
Forbes was a five-star recruit in 2018 out of Folsom High School, located near Sacramento. A versatile wing rated as the No. 35 player in the nation by ESPN, Forbes committed to Cal, where Lindsay Gottlieb had built a solid program and was just a few years removed from a Final Four appearance in the NCAA Tournament. But Gottlieb was hired away by the Cleveland Cavaliers after Forbes’ freshman season.
Like Padilla, Forbes found a new home in the Ivy League at Harvard, but the process wasn’t smooth. Her decision to transfer came after the university’s transfer deadline, forcing Forbes to take a gap year and attempt to enroll the next spring. As an undergraduate transfer, she would have had to sit out the 2019-20 season anyway. Forbes took classes at a local junior college to maintain her NCAA eligibility.
Then the Ivy League canceled its 2020-21 season due to COVID-19.
“It was the first time in my life where I was like, ‘Oh my God, I don’t have teammates,’” Forbes said of her two seasons away from basketball.
When Forbes finally returned to the court in 2021 at Harvard, she averaged just under 14 points per game. The next year, she converted at a 40% clip from three, the only Ivy League player to hit that mark (Padilla ranked second in the conference at 38.6%). Encouraged by her coach, she made the decision to enter the transfer portal midway through the season, way back in December. Despite being in the portal, she was still eligible to finish the year with her team, helping the Crimson reach the quarterfinals of the Women’s NIT tournament.
Forbes is thankful to have had the extra time to go through the recruiting process, though things were a bit awkward. For example, just a month after playing Florida State early in the season, the Seminoles’ staff started to recruit her, wishing her luck before conference games in January.
“It was weird,” Forbes said of those interactions.
The transfer portal process ahead of her graduate year was much more direct than the first time around.
“Going through the process was a lot more clear-cut. When you’re coming out of high school, it’s a lot of fluff,” Forbes said. (Padilla calls it glitz and glam.) “When I was a grad transfer, it was like, ‘OK, what are you looking for?,’ which I appreciated.”
Gottlieb also acknowledged the importance of authenticity in attracting graduate transfers like Forbes.
“If I understand where a player is coming from, I hope to be able to then provide those things they said that they wanted, and I don’t promise things that I can’t deliver,” Gottlieb said.
Forbes says Gottlieb told her that she didn’t want to coach her former player again at USC simply because Gottlieb knew Forbes’ family. It was deeper than that. Gottlieb knew Forbes could contribute to the program with her versatility on the court and her personality off it, while she could earn the business degree she wanted, too.
Just as they supported each other in their commitment to Gottlieb, Forbes and Padilla have continued to be almost inseparable since arriving at USC. The pair are roommates and lean on each other as they acclimate to their new school and environment. Whether it’s providing feedback about mutual struggles or simply sharing good news about their lives, Forbes and Padilla have found a connection in each other, a sisterhood of sorts.
And, in fact, the support goes even further.
Gottlieb brought in two more graduate transfers for the upcoming season: Kaitlyn Davis, another former Ivy Leaguer arriving via Columbia, and Roxane Makolo, who played at Purdue and TCU. Forbes, Davis, Padilla and Makolo are all currently working toward their master’s degrees in entrepreneurship and innovation at USC. So not only do they get to work together on the court in the upcoming year as veteran additions, but also in the classroom at the Marshall School of Business.
“It’s been nice because they literally almost lived an exact identical experience, but just at another school,” Padilla said. “It’s helpful to have people who understand what we went through and can apply that to what we’re going through now.”
And with USC undefeated through ten games and ranked No. 6 in the nation, that shared experience is escalating onto the national stage. Freshman phenom guard JuJu Watkins is garnering much of the public attention, but both Forbes and Padilla have been paramount to the Trojans’ perfect start as the only players to start in all of the team’s contests.
In the absence of Watkins and two other starters for USC’s December 21 matchup at Long Beach State, Forbes dropped a career-high 36 points to lift her team to a gritty win. Meanwhile, after a rather slow start, Padilla has gotten hot as of late, putting up her two best performances of the season in the Trojans’ last two games.
As a highly-anticipated showdown with No. 2 UCLA awaits USC on Saturday, Gottlieb and the Trojans will need these two veterans to step up again. And after everything they’ve been through to get here, you better believe Kayla Padilla and McKenzie Forbes will be ready for this moment.