By now, you’ve probably heard that Marquette has the #8 2020 recruiting class in the country according to 247 Sports. That’s nice and all, and I’m sure watching Dawson Garcia, Oso Ighodaro, and Justin Lewis will be very fun. However, the lifeblood of any college basketball program is recruiting, and so the MU coaching staff is hard at work putting together their 2021 recruiting class.
Recently, they made two new scholarship offers for that group, so let’s get caught up, shall we?
Stevie Mitchell
2021 Wilson West Lawn (PA) and @PhillyPrideAAU guard Stevie Mitchell just received an offer from Marquette, his coach tells me
— Ari Rosenfeld (@ARosenfeldHoops) December 2, 2019
Marquette is the latest school to offer 2021 Wilson (PA) PG Stevie Mitchell.
— THE MILLER REPORT ™️ (@miller_report) December 2, 2019
247 Sports lists Mitchell as a 6’1”, 165 pound point guard out of Reading, Pennsylvania. He attends Wilson High School there, but as you can see from his 247 Sports page, he plays for a grassroots team named Philly Pride. Reading is about halfway between Harrisonburg and Philadelphia, so that all makes sense. Wilson HS is about an hour’s drive from Villanova’s campus if that helps draw the picture for you.
Mitchell may be something of an underrated recruit at the moment. 247 Sports has him at #97 in the country in the class of 2021 in their Composite ranking system, which is obviously very good. However, Mitchell is not rated or ranked in their internal system..... and he’s still getting a top 100 ranking without their own setup noticing him at all yet. That’s..... really good. He’s also the #15 ranked point guard in the class and the #5 prospect in the state of Pennsylvania.
According to this recent article from the Reading Eagle, Mitchell led Philly Pride in scoring last summer at 25 points per game. As a result, his recruitment blew up, going from no offers to 11 in just a few months, and Marquette is merely the latest one. You really should check out that article, as it discusses Mitchell’s drive to improve himself over the last year or so. Here’s a big quote from Philly Pride coach Brandon Williams:
“He’s not super-quick or super-athletic,” Williams said, “but he has a sense of how to get to spots on the floor without effort. Everything with Stevie is at a controlled pace, and he maintains that against (top) competition.
”I love the fact that the moment’s never too big for him. He remains calm and humble. When you’ve got that (demeanor) with talent, that’s when you get a top 100 player.”
According to MaxPreps, Wilson is already 6-0 this season, and a lot of that has to do with Mitchell. Here’s a recap article of Wilson’s recent 77-44 victory that had coaches from Marquette and Virginia in attendance that really helps explain the kind of impact he can have on a game.
I can’t track down any useful YouTube videos to embed at this point, but Mitchell does have a Hudl page. It has a sophomore year highlight reel on it, and it has been updated as his 2019-20 season gets going.
Jalen Warley
Four-star junior Jalen Warley tells @Stockrisers that he’s been offered by Marquette. Rising guard has impressed from the summer up until now. Expect recruiting to pick up.
— Jake (@jakeweingarten) December 2, 2019
For the moment, there’s not a whole lot of detailed information out there on Warley in terms of national recruiting rankings. I have figured out that he’s a Class of 2021 recruit, and that he attends Westtown School in West Chester, Pennsylvania, which is about 15 miles away from Villanova’s campus. I don’t know about you, but I like wandering around in Jay Wright’s backyard for recruits.
Warley doesn’t appear to have a 247 Sports page, ESPN page, or a Rivals page. That’s fine, sometimes guys jump out of the woodwork as they go from sophomores to juniors. D1 Circuit has a stats page from the EYBL with Team Durant this past summer, which lists him at 6’5”. Adam Zagoria, when mentioning Warley’s recent offer from Seton Hall, noted his height at 6’7”. Until we get someone putting up a full profile page on him, I guess we’ll just have to file him as “miscellaneous wing” for now.
A check through of Twitter, since we don’t have recruiting sites to check, shows us a recent offer from Oregon on top of that SHU offer. If you keep going back, you find offers from California and Xavier, too.
The mystery about Warley’s height is interesting, by the way. As of August 2018, according to this PrepHoops.com Q&A, Warley was 6’2”. Just a three inch boom would do wonders for his recruiting ranking (he was only hearing from Howard at the time), and if he’s up to 6’7” with the skills learned up to 2018 of being a 6’2” guard, that will go a long way towards his upper limit development as a player.
There aren’t any videos of Warley out there, or at least not any long highlight reels. There’s a couple of “here, watch this one play” things up on YouTube, which sounds like a lot of work for a largely pointless payoff.