Wisconsin recruiting: basketball highlights and a few football postseason honors

Recruiting is the lifeblood of any major college athletics team, but following it closely as a fan can sometimes be difficult and can often be time consuming. We’ll try and condense all the recruiting news you can use into this bi-weekly post. It’ll include updates on current commits, including stats from their high school games, as well as news on players the Badgers are still pursuing. Let’s get down to business!

Basketball recruit updates

• 2020 wing Carter Gilmore (Hartland) who has accepted a PWO spot at Wisconsin and will be signing in the spring, is having a monster season for Arrowhead so far. Gilmore, who has seven D-1 scholarship offers, is going to be a very useful player for Greg Gard and it’s amazing they didn’t have to use a scholarship to get him.

His numbers, uh, are going to go up after this game. Well not his rebounds...smh.

• 2020 3-star PG commit Lorne Bowman (West Broomfield, Mich.) is going to bring something to the table that the Badgers haven’t had in a couple of years. D’Mitrik Trice does a lot of things well, but his ability to break down defenses and get his own shot or create an open look for a teammate is a bit limited.

According to Evan Flood, Bowman had 25 points and six assists in the game above and helped St. Mary’s beat No. 6 Clarkston. He also sounds like a leader and says exactly what you’d hope your point guard would say.

Here’s an excerpt from an Oakland Press article after the game against Clarkston that got me quite excited for Bowman to get on campus:

Bowman scored 25 points, many of them coming at the most opportune of times, propelling the Eaglets to a convincing 68-55 victory over powerhouse Clarkston. To end the momentum-swinging third quarter, the Wisconsin-signee put in seven straight in the final minute, including a triple from the left elbow at the buzzer to provide St. Mary’s a 47-37 lead heading down the stretch.

2021 Wisconsin 4-star SG target Julian Roper added 14 points for St. Mary’s in the win.

Football commit updates

• With all of the linebacker talent that was signed in the 2020 class, Malik Reed often gets overlooked. He could be a pleasant surprise for Badger fans though.

• Here are the final junior season highlights for 2021 3-star QB commit Deacon Hill (Santa Barbara, Calif.). It will be fun to follow Hill’s senior season and see how much he progress he makes.

• 2020 4-star LB Nick Herbig (Honolulu, Hawaii) was named first-team all-state and defensive player of the year. He’s teammate, Jayden de Laura pictured here as well, was named offensive player of the year. Saint Louis was stacked this year.

Random recruiting ephemera

• I used to make All-Name teams by going through college football preview magazines and reading every roster and then writing down the best ones. I did this after walking up hill to school both ways in a blizzard!

• Go Zags!