There’s no place like home.
Those were the legendary words of Dorothy as she clicked her ruby slippers together en route for Kansas.
Evidently they hold true for those wearing cleats, sneakers and running shoes, too.
That’s because just like every other sect of the USM population, athletes keep rolling into USM from far away lands and pricy schools to start fresh or finish what they’ve started
And this year is no exception.
Coach Mike Keller had the pleasant surprise this year of inheriting three collegiate transfers, all from the Casco Bay watershed originally, who decided that USM was where they wanted to be.
Sophomores Alex Burnham (North Yarmouth), Adam Gadbois (Brunswick) and Nick Johnson (South Portland) have all found their way back to the state and the way life should be — and with them they bring a familiar tale.
“It brings is back home,” Gadbois, a transfer from Bryant University and a former High School All-American said, “It’s like being back and playing backyard soccer with your friends.”
Gadbois is not alone. Burnham, also a transfer from Bryant College, and Johnson, who spent his first year at Salve Regina University, have both felt a sort of homecoming since joining the school’s soccer team.
In part, the homecoming atmosphere stems from these athletes having played with current Huskies on club soccer teams from the time they were in grade school.
“Petey McHugh first planted the seed in my head about coming here,” Gadbois explains, referring to junior midfielder Peter McHugh (Scarborough) who he played club soccer with for ten years during their schoolboy days.
But there is another component that makes the transition easier: the coaches and staff.
Head coach Mike Keller has seen his fair share of transfers in his day. In fact, key senior starters Ben Slagle (Scarborough) and Brian King (Gorham) join the new trio on the list of key transfers.
“USM is the place to come back to,” Keller says. “It’s a large school with a small school atmosphere and we put academics first.”
The school’s location, aside from being handy to the players’ hometowns, is also a key point of interest.
“I like living in Portland,” Burnham says simply.
The school has a rich tradition of inheriting very skilled athletes from other, often larger programs.
Two years ago former Deering High School standout Jamaal Caterina (Portland) transferred onto the men’s basketball team after stints with American University and the University of New Hampshire.
The men’s cross-country team, too, has been a beneficiary of athletes wishing to downsize.
This year coach Scott Hutchison gladly accepted J.J. Forcella (Falmouth) from the University of Maine, who helped bolster an already impressive recruiting year for the team.
Still, the trio of transfers on the soccer team point to the cost of education, the quality of the facilities and the more laid back atmosphere of Division III sports (and USM in general) as key reasons for transferring.
“This is much more laid back. Bryant was completely oriented around sports, but you still get treated well around here,” Burnham says of his decision, a notion his teammate Gadbois echoes. “I know when I was at Bryant it was more like work.”
But transfer athletes do cause some problems like uprooting traditionally recruited freshman.
“I have actually recruited people out of the program,” Keller says, explaining that some transfers end up taking the spots of those athletes he has recruited from high school.
Nevertheless, at a school where nearly half of the newly accepted students are transfers, non-traditional is in fact the norm.