Marquette Offers A Scholarship To 2020 Forward Justin Lewis

It’s July, so that means that Marquette head coach Steve Wojciechowski and his assistants are out on the road evaluating prospects on a regular basis. Those evaluations turn into in-house discussions, and possibly even a scholarship offer. After a quiet week or so, the MU recruiting machine has jumped back into action and a scholarship offer has been extended to Justin Lewis, a four star Class of 2020 forward prospect from Maryland.

247 Sports grades Lewis as a four-star prospect, but that’s a pretty deep group of guys at this point. Lewis is ranked #138 in the country by 247’s Composite system, which means there’s a whole mess of four-star guys running around right now in the 2020 class. 247’s internal system has Lewis at #89 in the country, so perhaps they’re a little ahead of the curve on him. The 6’7”, 225 pound Lewis is listed as a power forward by 247, and according to them, he has offers already from the likes of Georgetown, Maryland, St. John’s, Virginia Tech, Kansas State, and more.

Lewis attends Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, which sounded familiar to me when I saw it. That’s because Lewis was one of the guys that Marquette’s coaching staff reached out to on their first day of being able to make phone calls to the Class of 2020. With that in mind, it seems possible that this offer has been coming for a while now, but it was just a matter of being able to put Wojo on the phone with Lewis to actually make the offer. It’s also possible that given the other schools that were reaching out to Lewis on Day 1 (notably La Salle, Ohio, and Bryant) that the MU staff wanted to get a bit more evaluation in on Lewis to make sure that he would be able to fit in against Big East foes instead of, say, the MAC or the NEC.

Baltimore Polytechnic Institute’s boys’ basketball team won the Maryland Class 3A state title in 2018, giving them two straight state titles. Lewis had 20 points and 12 rebounds in the title game, which was just his first title with Poly after transferring following his freshman year. That kind of a double-double performance on the biggest prep stage possible is a big jump from averaging eight points and 10 rebounds at Calvert Hall the season before.

There doesn’t seem to be any decent highlight packages online of Lewis, although there is this five minute reel of highlights from a game where he scored 36 in a big Baltimore city rivalry game. However, it’s highlights of the WHOLE game, showing great plays by his teammates and their opponents, too. If you want Lewis-specific clips, there is a Hudl page, but everything is from his Calvert Hall days.

The Class of 2020 will be an important one for the Marquette staff. Not only does Marquette project to have four scholarships opening up, MU will also be aiming to replace Sam Hauser and Markus Howard at that point. It’s quite clear even right now that it will be a struggle to replace those two, as they’re going to end up as two of the most prolific players in program history when (if?) they finish up their four years at Marquette.

Here’s what the scholarship chart looks like right now.