Trejuan Holloman Puts Marquette In His Top Six

On Monday, we got a bit of a connective tissue between the previous Marquette men’s basketball regime and the current incarnation led by Shaka Smart. Trejuan Holloman, a top 75 prospect in the Class of 2022, announced his top six schools, and yes, YOUR Golden Eagles are on the list. They’re joined by Dayton, Illinois, Michigan State, Minnesota, and Oklahoma State.

Marquette offered Holloman a scholarship back in August of 2019. That offer, of course, came from Steve Wojciechowski and his staff. Shaka Smart is in charge now, but that doesn’t mean that he’s picking up where Wojciechowski left off in this case. In fact, thanks to some Twitter detective work and as we noted in our article about MU’s offer, Smart actually offered Holloman a scholarship at Texas before Marquette offered, way back in December of 2018. It’s safe to say that Smart might have had a chance to bring Holloman into MU with just his previous recruiting relationship, but it probably helped that Holloman knew at least a little bit about Marquette to start with as well.

That’s a nice confluence of events for the Golden Eagles, as it turns out. Back when Wojciechowski made his offer, Holloman wasn’t rated or ranked by 247 Sports, but that was more about “it was too early” than any indication about his talent level. Now? The 6’1”, 165 pound point guard out of the Twin Cities in Minnesota is a four-star prospect ranked #52 in the country in the Class of 2022. To put it another way, if Holloman were to suddenly decide to commit to Marquette today, the Golden Eagles would, according to 247’s Class Calculator, instantaneously become the #14 ranked recruiting class in the country and tops in the Big East. That’s part “Holloman is very good” and part “it is still very early in the recruiting cycle.” Holloman is the #8 point guard in the recruiting class, two national spots in front of recent UNC commit and Wisconsin native Seth Trimble, and the top player in the state of Wisconsin. He’s also the top player in the state of Minnesota for 2022, easily scooting in front of Eli King, who is at #76.

Because Holloman plays at Cretin Derham Hall in St. Paul, that means we can rely on the Star Tribune’s always helpful Basketball Hub to tell us things about how his past season went. They have the team putting up a record of 18-6, but there’s only 23 games worth of stats for Holloman. Interestingly enough, they list him at 6’3” instead of the 6’1” that 247 Sports is showing. Gonna chalk that up to the pandemic. Anyway, in those games, Holloman tallied 20.3 points per game for the Raiders, making him the only double-digit scorer on the squad. He shot just 33.8% from behind the arc on 77 attempts, but if you factor in the fact that he was getting the most defensive attention on the team, that’s not too bad. He also chipped in 4.7 rebounds per game, good enough for fourth best, and dished out a whopping 9.3 assists per game. That’s a crazy high number, particularly with no one else averaging even two per contest. Holloman’s 4.2 steals per game probably helped push him to at least an extra assist or two per game.

Here’s a four minute junior year highlight reel that just went up in late May of this year.

And now, the scholarship chart.

For 2021-22, Marquette’s best option in terms of a point guard is “play a bunch of ballhandlers together and hope it works out.” That situation is only going to get worse when Darryl Morsell moves on after his COVID-bonus season, and there’s a chance that Greg Elliott is either done with college hoops after this coming season or goes elsewhere for his COVID-bonus season. With that being the case, getting a immediate impact point guard is a major need for Marquette with four projected open scholarship spots. Holloman fits that idea nearly perfectly. Can Smart win him over while up against a home state and home town team plus two great programs in that same league, not to mention Oklahoma State and Dayton?