Wisconsin recruiting: a big visit weekend goes well

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 (sometimes more) 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!

• I know we’re all disappointed by the loss on Saturday but it is important to note that it is doubtful to have a large effect on the team’s recruiting efforts.

Losing to Eastern Michigan this weekend by multiple scores? That’ll have a negative effect on recruiting. Losing to a ranked Penn State team by six? Not so much.

Visitors from Saturday (football edition)

• There were a ton of football recruits on campus over the weekend to check out Madison, the football program and the real gameday experience and by all accounts on social media it appears that things went quite well! One of the top prospects remaining on Wisconsin’s board, 4-star IOL Billy Schrauth (Fond du Lac), has slowly but surely been receiving Crystal Ball predictions on 247Sports for Wisconsin. The national recruiting guy, the Ohio State recruiting guy and, most importantly, the Notre Dame recruiting guy have all predicted Schrauth to Madison over the past couple of days.
• Here is an incomplete list of players, compiled from tweets, that were in attendance on Saturday. I’m not going to embed all of the tweets here, but rest assured they all basically looked like this one:

2023 ATH Zander Rockow (Eau Claire), 2023 DL Will McDonald (Hudson), 2023 ATH Keany Parks (Kenosha), 2023 ATH Najeh Mitchell (De Pere), 2023 ATH Wynn Stang (Mukwonago), 2023 QB Jerry Kaminski (Sun Prairie), 2023 CB Andre Crews (Chicago), 2023 3-star WR Kai Black (Urbandale, Iowa), 2023 3-star WR Pierce Walsh (Lisle, Ill.) and 2024 OT Derek Jensen (Hartland) were players whose tweets we’ve seen come across the timeline.

There were a ton of other players there as well, and you can check out BadgerBlitz’s front page or Badger247’s front page and get the info there, although much of it is behind a paywall.

Visitors from Saturday (men’s basketball edition)

• There were some men’s hoops recruits on campus this past weekend too. First of all, 2024 wing Caden Wilkins (Bettendorf, Iowa) made the trip to Madison for an unofficial visit. Currently, the Badgers and Hawkeyes have shown early interest in the 6-foot-6 prospect. Many think that Wilkins will be the top rated player in Iowa for the 2024 cycle.

The more immediately relevant prospect that was on campus on Saturday, however, was 2022 3-star (247Sports only) SG Connor Essegian (Albion, Ind.) out of Central Noble High School. After the visit, Evan Flood put in a Crystal Ball for the Badgers and interviewed Essegian ($) who mentioned how great the atmosphere was on campus on weekend.

The Badgers have, at most, two scholarships available for the 2022 cycle and will definitely need a guard that can provide some shooting. It sounds like Essegian is quite high on UW, but also likes Wake Forest so we’ll see where this recruitment goes since Wisconsin has already fallen out of favor with guard prospects in the ‘22 class.