Wisconsin basketball recruiting: some holiday weekend updates from the hardwood

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 (or more often since we are in Uncertain Times and there aren’t actual sports going on) 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!

Top in-state player set to visit Madison

• 2022 4-star PG Seth Trimble (Menomonee Falls) has really seen his recruitment hit a new level over the last couple of months. Recent offers from Michigan and North Carolina have, most likely, pushed the Badgers out of the running for Trimble’s services. According to Jake Weingarten of Stockrisers, Trimble has official visits set up to Ann Arbor and Chapel Hill in June and also a pair of unofficial visits to in-state schools Marquette and Wisconsin.

We’ll discuss the new Rivals rankings for the 2022 class in a bit, but Trimble skyrocketed up the list in the new release last week. He is now the No. 34 player in the class (up 75 spots from their last update!) and the No. 8 PG in the nation. Standing at 6-foot-3 and weighing around 180 pounds, Trimble has ideal size for a lead guard but the Badgers seem to have homed in on 3-star PG Rowan Brumbaugh as their floor general for the ‘22 class. Sadly, both Rivals and 247 have Trimble predicted to choose the Wolverines.

A new name to keep an eye on

• Now I’m not going to say “I called it” on this, because I very much didn’t...but living in the Twin Cities and being more plugged into high school basketball than a person probably should be, Demarion Watson-Saulsberry (Minneapolis), out of Totino-Grace High School, is a name that I’ve heard before and thought “the Badgers could use a player like that.”

Well, according to Evan Flood at over at 247Sports ($), the Badgers are doing their due diligence on the 4-star wing. The 6-foot-6 and 175 pound small forward is rated as the No. 105 player in the country by the 247 Composite and holds offers from Creighton, Florida, Iowa, Iowa State, Marquette, Minnesota, Stanford, Xavier and others. The Badgers haven’t offered yet, but it would be great to see them get in the mix here.

New Rivals rankings

• As we linked above (and also here again because we love you) Rivals came out with an updated rankings of the top-150 players in the class of 2022. The Badgers are after a number of players on the list

No. 34, 4-star PG Seth Trimble (Menomonee Falls)
No. 67, 4-star PF Isaac Traudt (Grand Island, Neb.)
No. 71, 4-star SF Camden Heide (Wayzata, Minn.)
No. 79, 4-star PG Trejuan Holloman (St. Paul, Minn.)
No. 107, 4-star C Joe Hurlburt (Enderlin, N.D.), committed to Colorado
No. 123, 3-star PF Ahjany Lee (Byron, Minn.)
No. 136, 3-star SF Demarion Watson-Saulsberry (Minneapolis)

There are a couple of other players that the Badgers have been linked to but most of the players that they are high on (Brumbaugh, Jaden Schutt, Braeden Moore, Braden Huff) did not make the updated rankings. All are rated as 3-stars (except for Huff who isn’t rated currently) and have pretty good offer lists, but haven’t quite cracked the upper echelon of recruits yet.