PC adds athletic wing guard and dangerous deep shooter in latest portal pickups
By KEVIN McNAMARA
Shooters, play-makers, versatile defenders.
Those were just three of the skills that new Providence coach Bryan Hodgson identified as he set out in his first foray in college basketball’s transfer portal building the Friars’ roster. So far, so good.
The latest multi-skilled player to pledge to the Friars is Devin Vanterpool, a 6-4 sophomore at Florida Atlantic who was named the American Canonference’s Most Improved player this past season. Vanterpool is the son of former St. Bonny star and current Washington Wizards assistant coach David Vanterpool. He was a 3’rd team All-American Conference pick after averaging 15.8 points, 6.3 rebounds, and 2.4 assists while making 52 threes at a 35% clip.
Vanterpool scored 26 points (with three 3-pointers) in a 83-81 loss to Hodgson’s South Florida team on Feb. 15 but was shut down for the final seven games of the season with an ankle injury. After a redshirt freshman season averaging only eight minutes a game, Vanterpool played over 31 minutes a night in 2025-26 and eclipsed 20 points seven different times.
A former New York City high school star at Christ the King, Vanterpool entered the portal last week and heard from schools like UCLA and Maryland before picking the Friars.
Vanterpool is also known as a high-level defender and is clearly one of the reasons why the Friars did not pursue Wes Enis, the high-scoring shooter who played for Hodgson this past season at South Florida. While maybe not as explosive a shooter as the 6-foot-2 Enis (who landed at Big East rival Creighton), Vanterpool is a dangerous wing shooter, can handle the ball from the point guard spot and is a much bigger and more explosive athlete.
Adding Vanterpool to returnee Ryan Mela, portal add Miles Byrd and NBA G League scorer Dink Pate has helped Hodgson cover the wing scoring position. The coach also feels that Pate and Vanterpool can play the point guard spot. Gavin Hightower, a portal transfer from South Florida, is a pure point guard.
The other news of the moment is the addition of a pure sniper in Ryan Sabol of the University of Buffalo. There are few players in college basketball who’ve made more of an impact from the 3-point line than Sabol has in his three years with the Bulls. Sabol averaged 18.8 points as a junior with 122 threes on 40 percent shooting. He’s made a whopping 263 threes in three seasons. Just this past season Sabol hit for five or more threes in 13 games.
While Vanterpool and Pate are both strong 3-point shooter, Sabol looms as a dangerous marksman off the bench who must always be accounted for.
Sabol’s commitment makes six players in the fold for the Friars. The remaining spots will assuredly be focused on frontcourt size and more point guard depth. Hodgson promised a hearty influx of talent and while it’s impossible to see just where all the pieces fit just yet, he is certainly delivering.
“We are going to get very, very talented basketball players here,” Hodgson said last week. “We’ve had a lot of success building rosters where we’ve been in my time as an assistant coach and as a head coach and I’ll tell you we’ve put together the best rosters in the leagues that we’ve been in. We did that at the University of Buffalo, at Alabama and then as a head coach at both Arkansas State at South Florida. We plan to do the same thing here.”
Among the big men the Friars are chasing are Yale’s Samson Aletan and Northwestern center Arrinton Page. Aletan averaged 7.8 points and 5.8 rebounds as a junior in the Ivy League. He’s a 6-10, 235-pounder with explosive athletic ability. Page has played for three schools (USC, Cincinnati, Northwestern) and will now play his senior season at his fourth school in four years. Page did have his best collegiate season with Northwestern, in which he appeared in 29 games with 16 starts, averaging 10.2 points, 4.5 rebounds, 1.8 assists, 0.9 steals and 1.2 blocks per game. He did this playing 22.9 minutes per game and shot the ball at a 54.6% clip.
