Wisconsin basketball recruiting: top targets still considering Greg Gard’s squad

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!

Badgers make top-nine

• Fast-rising 2023 3-star wing prospect Jamie Kaiser Jr. (Burke, Va.) has pared his list down to nine schools that he’ll be focusing on moving forward and the Badgers made the cut. The other eight schools are Boston College, Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Miami (Fla.), Virginia, Wake Forest and West Virginia.

Kaiser has already taken an official visit to Wisconsin (back on May 2) and Harvard while he just took one to UVa this past weekend as well. It will be telling on which two schools he takes his final official visits to, but it sounds like Iowa and Maryland could be in the mix for those.

Speaking of official visits!

• According to Evan Flood at Badger247, 3-star wing Gehrig Normand (North Richland Hills, Texas) will be taking an official visit to Madison on June 20. The Badgers only recently jumped into his top group as they offered last week, so this is impressive that he has already decided to travel up to see campus. Mizzou and Texas are the other two official visits that Normand has scheduled, per Flood’s post. 247’s Brandon Jenkins also notes that Tennessee should get a visit from Normand at some point.

The Badgers are good at evaluating talent

• Greg Gard’s staff has never been accused of being poor talent evaluators. Their problem has been closing on the talent that they discover before other schools, but they are often one of the first schools to offer a player before he blows up on the trail. That being said, it should come as no surprise that On3 Recruiting National Analysts Gerry Hamilton and Jamie Shaw had to name a 2023 prospect that will “have the biggest summer” ($) in a recent Q&A post and Shaw picked Kaiser while Hamilton picked Normand.