Dave Van Horn, Arkansas baseball turn attention to transfer portal
The Diamond Hogs saw their season come to an end in the Lawrence Regional in northeast Kansas on Sunday night, but there’s no offseason ahead of the coaching staff.
With the end of the season comes the transfer portal, and Arkansas head coach Dave Van Horn will have to go to the well often to replace the players he’s losing ahead of the 2027 season.
Van Horn said after Sunday’s loss to Kansas that while it’s not the way he’d like to go about it, using the transfer portal to rebuild his roster is a must in this day and age of college baseball.
“If you want to compete in the Southeastern Conference, (it’s a) full-grown man league,” Van Horn said. “It’s hard to win with three freshmen in the lineup and a couple of freshman pitchers that you depend on every weekend. It’s just not going to happen. You got to get guys that have some experience, and so we’ll be in the middle of it. It starts tomorrow. We all know it. We’re ready for it. But our goal still is to get really good high school kids.”
In 2026, Arkansas followed up its College World Series semifinal run in 2025 with a loss in the regional round, but it’s not alone in that fact. In fact, all eight teams that were in Omaha last year are sitting at home watching the postseason from the couch. UCLA — the No. 1 overall seed — got walked off by Saint Mary’s. LSU, last year’s National Champion, didn’t even make the postseason at all.
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Part of the reason for that lies in timing. The Super Regional round is this weekend, and guess what? The transfer portal is already open. It’s a thin line to toe when it comes to both recruiting new players for next year’s roster while also competing with the team you have.
“You got to get some help, and you got to be able to get those kids, so we needed help,” Van Horn said. “We didn’t get the help we needed right away, and they ended up other places so I’m sure that’s the same thing that happened to some other schools. When you’re in Omaha, teams are getting a jump on you. They’re getting kids in immediately. Kids are taking it, and that’s where they go, and when you play a couple weeks in on that thing, it’s late June, and a lot of the good ones are gone.”
What Arkansas must replace in the transfer portal
The needs will be many for the Razorbacks this cycle. There’s a 30-day window for players to enter the transfer portal but they don’t have to commit in that span.
Arkansas will need to replace a few core pieces from this past year’s squad: shortstop Camden Kozeal, catcher Ryder Helfrick and lefty ace Hunter Dietz are almost assuredly gone to the professional ranks. Both Kozeal and Helfrick were players Van Horn talked specifically about after the season-ending loss on Sunday.
“He reminds me of some of the guys that I’ve had in the past that played in the big leagues,” Van Horn said of Helfrick. ”The bat came on, the power came on. Yeah, we’re going to miss him a lot. And then, Cam, just an Omaha kid. You know, I’m so happy he got to play in Omaha last year with us, and, you know, what a year he had last year, he hit a little bit higher for an average.
“This year, he hit for big-time power, drove in 70 runs, put him at shortstop midway through the season, we said, ’hey, we got to see if you can do it, and he did it for the most part. I mean, just a great person, popular amongst teammates, both of them are. We’re losing two big-time leaders that have made their mark with Arkansas Razorback Baseball and me personally.”
There’s also still questions surrounding what rising junior pitcher Carson Wiggins — who did not appear in a single game this year despite being 100% healthy in May, according to Dave Van Horn — will do. Infielders will be a heavy emphasis for the Razorbacks in the transfer portal, as they’ll have to replace Kozeal and likely TJ Pompey at third base, as this was his money year in relation to the MLB Draft.
Center fielder Maika Niu will also need to be replaced, as he’s completely out of eligibility. Left fielder Damian Ruiz will have a decision to make with one year of eligibility remaining as well.
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