NCAA transfer portal helps former Belleville basketball star finally find a fit at Gonzaga

When Malachi Smith decided to transfer from Wright State University following the 2018-19 season, he heard from only two teams who were eager to bring him on board.

When he decided to transfer from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga at the conclusion of last season, he estimated that he heard from about 50, ten of whom reached out as soon as his name hit the transfer portal.

Welcome to the new world of college sports.

Smith, who played three years at Belleville East before graduating from Belleville West, is now a core player for 15th-ranked Gonzaga, leading the Bulldogs in three-point percentage and leading their guards in steals as he shows off a well-rounded game that was built in Belleville and now could have him on the cusp on the NBA.

“You have to view it like you are where your feet are,” Smith said Tuesday in discussing the stops along the path of his basketball journey. “My feet are right here at Gonzaga, and taking it a day at a time and everything else to take care of yourself.

“If you look ahead, you miss out on the journey. Like the memories and the stuff that I’m going through right now, that’s memories that are going to last a lifetime.”

Smith’s back court pairing with EJ Liddell for the Maroons led Belleville West to the first of two consecutive 4A State Championships in 2018. After graduating, he attended Wright State University, where he found inconsistent playing time and a lack of a clear path forward in his basketball career.

Transferring to UT Chattanooga, though, wasn’t a simple decision — at the time, NCAA rules required players to sit out a full season as a redshirt, and Smith did, missing 2019-20.

“When you sit out a year,” Smith explained, “you can kind of say, ‘OK, what does the team look like in two years?’ And then it’s a little more uncertainty.”

Those transfer rules, of course, applied to players and not coaches. For athletes transferring under the old system, there was a constant risk of finding themselves under a new staff who may not appreciate their talents or feel obligated to keep promises that might’ve been made by a past regime.

A rule change in 2021, paired with the approval of name, image and licensing rights deals that allowed student athletes to receive endorsement payments, eliminated the waiting period, freeing up the NCAA transfer portal to allow highly sought after players to improve their situations in ways previously only available to the administrative figures who benefited from their talents.

Downstate talent

Those rules can be highly beneficial for athletes from areas like the metro-east which might struggle to attract the attention of top tier recruiters. Sandwiched between typical talent hotbeds in St. Louis and Chicago, Smith agreed that the most talented players at downstate high schools have a harder time getting on those powerful Division I radars.

“If you look at the players who have made it out, like Malcolm Hill (Belleville East, University of Illinois, Chicago Bulls), Jordan Goodwin (Althoff, St. Louis University, Washington Wizards), look at every interview [Goodwin] does. He just talks about how where we’re from, we’re overlooked.

“We have to kind of get up out of the mud, you know? We have to work five times harder, ten times harder, just to be seen, just to get the opportunity.”

That opportunity for Smith, now, is imminent. He declared for the NBA Draft in the spring before deciding to return to school before the deadline, working out for teams and gaining valuable insight into how he was perceived around the league.

Time in the spotlight

Despite leading UT Chattanooga to a thrilling one-point loss to Illinois in the first round of the NCAA tournament, there was a belief he needed to display the kind of well-rounded athleticism against top notch talent that he may not have been regularly exposed to in his early career stops.

It was, yet again, a reminder all he needed was time in the spotlight, and Gonzaga represented a perfect opportunity to shine.

“Team-wise, obviously winning a national championship is something that the team has been trying to do for a long time,” he said of the Zags, currently ranked 15th in the AP men’s college poll. “And, you know, I like to view myself as a winner. And I feel like me being here, I’m going to be able to help contribute to that happening, whatever that looks like.”

‘It takes a little time’

What that’s looked like to date is performing as one of the country’s top sixth men and checking many of the boxes pro evaluators were eager to see. Smith was happy to point out both Hill and Goodwin were undrafted and now find themselves with professional opportunities at the highest level; if he follows their path, he’ll do so with the same understanding of what he means to basketball in the metro-east

“I see myself being at that level very soon,” he said. “It takes a little time, but we’re built for it. And being where we’re from has helped us be able to go through that.”

This story was originally published December 15, 2022 at 7:00 AM.