Two former Lake Region State College Royals now know the next stop in their careers.
Baseball player Jamison Nelson, who just completed his sophomore year, has transferred to play at Dakota State University, he announced on social media Wednesday.
Basketball player Tiyahna Trottier, a 2024 Royal, has transferred to play at Cleveland State University.
Nelson had a large part of his sophomore season wiped out by a wrist injury. He played in 28 games, though, and hit .268 with a .388 OBP. As a freshman in 2025, he played in 44 games and hit .261/.365/.435 with four home runs and 12 extra-base hits. He drove in 32 runs that year.
Nelson is a strong, left-handed-hitting first baseman from Mandan, N.D.
Dakota State, in Madison, S.D., competes in the NAIA’s Frontier Conference. One of the other teams in the conference is Mayville State, which also has some former Royals on its roster. This past season, Dakota State finished fourth out of six teams in the conference while Mayville State finished fifth.
Cleveland State women’s basketball, meanwhile, announced on Tuesday that Trottier has joined the program.
Cleveland State is a Division-I school in Cleveland, Ohio. According to Turtle Mountain Community High School’s Facebook page, Trottier will be the first Turtle Mountain alum to play D-I basketball.
Trottier, from Belcourt, N.D., has taken an interesting collegiate path. The 6-foot-1 forward started at LRSC in the 2023-24 season, averaging 9.6 points and 5.0 rebounds per game. The Royals’ head coach that year was Australia native Ryan Clark, who once played for LRSC himself.
Following the season, Clark took a job at Division-II Minot State University. Trottier followed him, transferring to Minot State instead of staying at LRSC for her sophomore year. But she redshirted in 2024-25 and didn’t play a single minute.
Trottier came back for the 2025-26 season and played in all 30 games for the Beavers, with 29 starts. She had a solid year, averaging 10.4 points and 2.8 rebounds.
She joins a Cleveland State program that finished third out of 11 teams in the Horizon League this past season. Cleveland State has had seven consecutive winning seasons.
In a 2024 interview with the Devils Lake Journal, following a 23-point performance for the Royals, Trottier said her goal was to get recruited by a four-year school, hoping most for Division I. It took some time — three seasons, two schools and one redshirt year — but her goal has finally come to fruition.
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