By Pat Harty

IOWA CITY, Iowa – If Ben McCollum had it his way, his roster would be filled almost entirely with players that he recruited directly out of high school; you know, the old-fashioned way of building a college basketball team.

However, those days are long gone as major college basketball moves deeper into this new era in which the transfer portal and name, image and likeness are making it so rosters are more fluid than ever before.

And that is especially true when a coaching change occurs, and look no further than Iowa’s current roster under McCollum.

Redshirt freshman forward Cooper Koch is the only holdover player on scholarship from the Fran McCaffery coaching era.

“Me preference-wise prefers high school always and that’s what we do,” McCollum said Thursday. “But I’ve had some really good transfers throughout the years that have helped us.

“But I would be naive to say that you can do it all with high school. You do have to adapt to the times whether you prefer something or not. But people in the program, and you’ll see how we’ll just continue to grow and grow and grow and grow; it just keeps getting better every day because they have to acclimate to a new program. So we’ll have to go with some transfers in the future.”

“Eventually, we’d like to recruit from within and see if we can do that. But I don’t know if we can actually do that now.”

McCollum addressed a number of topics as he met with the media Thursday morning.

Iowa (8-2) will face Bucknell (3-9) on Saturday at Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines.

McCollum was asked if he plans to add any players to Iowa’s 2026 recruiting class, which currently consists and four-star forward Ethan Harris, who is from the state of Washington.

“In the ’26 class, oh yeah,” McCollum said. “We need a point guard and then we need probably a big guy. We’ve got some really good kind of hybrids if you will, the 6-8 guys that can shoot. We’ve got some really good ones there. So I think we’re good there. We’ve just got to now maybe get some size and then a point guard on top of that.

“So we either do that through high school if they’re still available or you’ll have to go through the portal.”

McCollum is also willing to recruit players from overseas, which more schools are doing now.

In fact, he thought he had somebody from overseas set to join him at Iowa until NIL became an obstacle.

“We tried this year,” McCollum said without identifying the player. “We actually had one committed and then somebody else paid him more money. So it was one of those deals. He was good player, too.”

McCollum landed the Iowa job late last March after having led Drake to a 31-4 record in his only season as head coach.

He then immediately started to assemble his roster, which now includes six former Drake players, including star senior point guard Bennett Stirtz; Robert Morris transfer Alvaro Folgueiras, a 6-foot-10 forward from Spain; and Kansas State transfer Brendan Hausen, a 6-4 guard.

This is Stirtz’s final season of eligibility, so that’s why McCollum wants to sign a point guard in the 2026 class.

There is always the chance that McCollum could sign a point guard from overseas, but not without some serious vetting.

There are certain challenges with recruiting players from overseas besides the obvious ones such as distance from home and cultural differences. McCollum addressed some of those challenges with the media.

“I think overseas is tricky,” McCollum said. “We would like that. But I think the hardest part with overseas is trying to figure out what kind of competition they’re going against. So we tried to acclimate ourselves to that. I do think overseas the big guys are really good because they understand flow and they understand the rhythm of the game and they understand how to pass and all those different things.

“I think guards are a little bit trickier. I think there’s some good guard from overseas. But I think they’re tricky because the physicality from a guard perspective over here that you’re allowed to do is different. It’s just more physical and the athleticism from the guards is a little bit different. So you kind of get used to that playing the American style whereas over there those are fouls.”