Wisconsin basketball recruiting: UW offers 2023 wing Jamie Kaiser Jr.

The Wisconsin Badgers men’s hoops team made two new scholarship offers on Sunday. The first one was to unranked, but rapidly rising, 2023 wing Jamie Kaiser Jr. (Burke, Va.) out of Bishop Ireton (Alexandria, Va.) High School. The 6-foot-6 and 200 pound junior has offers from Creighton, George Washington, Rhode Island, Richmond, TCU, VCU and many other mid-majors. Ivies like Yale, Harvard and Columbia are on his list too, so you know academics are important to him.

Kaiser is also rated as a 3-star QB/ATH in football, and has offers from Maryland, Charlotte and Pitt. You KNOW Greg Gard got excited once he found out Kaiser was a quarterback, he’d build his whole team out of quarterbacks if he could! Did you know that Brad Daviso...::shock collar goes off::

Anyways! We messaged with Kaiser after the scholarship offer and he told us that he is “100% in basketball from now on.” Kaiser went on to say that he and Gard talked about him being a quarterback and “he said that those kids tend to be real tough and have special leadership qualities.”

Kaiser can shoot the rock, that’s for damn sure. He has a pretty stroke and has major range as well. It’s nice to see Gard and co. offering recruits like this, after watching last year’s team suffer from a supreme lack of sharpshooting. Kaiser isn’t some sort of athletic freak, but he can get to the rim and attack closeouts well enough. His athleticism will surely improve once he’s in a college strength program too.

“I’d say my best traits are bringing a certain toughness making shots and just doing the little things that people don’t notice,” Kaiser told us. I’d wager that this is pretty close to the ideal player that Gard would describe when asked what type of recruit he wants to go after.

This past weekend during the second spring evaluation period on the 3SSB Circuit (Adidas grassroots tournaments) in Spartanburg, S.C., Kaiser continued to make a name for himself. “Kaiser’s size, strength, toughness, understanding of how to play and his shot-making will become coveted amongst high major programs moving forward,” 247 Sports’ Travis Branham said.

With his size, Kaiser projects as a shooting guard/small forward type player and less of a combo guard, although he does have some nascent play-making ability that he would like to continue to improve. “I would definitely like to continue working on my ball handling and tightening up my moves,” Kaiser noted when we asked him to evaluate himself.

I couldn’t find stats for his junior season, but over his first two seasons of varsity ball, Kaiser averaged 19.3 points, 6.3 rebounds, 1.7 assists and 2.3 steals per game. All of his numbers were better in his sophomore season, except for steals which were 0.1 per game worse, including a massive 12 point jump in his per game averaged to 27.5. His Hudl tape from his junior year indicates that he led his high school team in scoring, rebounds and steals and was second in assists and deflections (love active hands on defense!).

It seems like Kaiser’s recruitment is really just getting started, but if Wisconsin can get him on campus this summer and seal the deal, he would be a nice complement to 2023 3-star CG John Blackwell as a foundation for that class.