Hofstra star and Deer Park native Preston Edmead to enter transfer portal, sources say
Hofstra's Preston Edmead celebrates a three-point basket against the Alabama Crimson Tide in the first round of the 2026 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament in Tampa, Fla. Credit: Getty Images/Mike Carlson
Preston Edmead, the freshman guard from Deer Park who last month hit one of the biggest shots in Hofstra basketball history to help propel the Pride to the NCAA Tournament, intends to enter the transfer portal that opened at midnight on Tuesday, sources confirmed to Newsday.
The move does not preclude him from returning to Hofstra for his sophomore season, but it allows him to explore other options at larger programs that can offer more lucrative name, image, likeness (NIL) deals.
Edmead won CAA Rookie of the Year and was MVP of the conference tournament. He hit a three-pointer off the glass in the final second of overtime of a CAA semifinal that beat Towson. In the NCAA Tournament, he scored a team-high 24 points in a 90-70 first round loss to Alabama.
Cruz Davis, the team’s leading scorer and CAA Player of the Year who has one season of eligibility remaining, had not yet declared an intention to enter the portal as of Monday evening, a source told Newsday. He still has time to make a decision on that.
After the NCAA Tournament loss, both Edmead and Davis expressed a strong desire to return to Hofstra.
“I haven’t even thought about [leaving],” Edmead said at the time. “I was always coming back. I was never thinking about anything else.”
Head coach Speedy Claxton said last month he was confident Hofstra could retain both star players and attempt to repeat as conference champs, but he understood it could be a challenge.
“The landscape is changing,” Claxton said of college basketball.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
