Marquette Offers A Scholarship To 2023 Guard Zaide Lowery

I think we have a new winner for “Most Interesting Scholarship Offer” since Shaka Smart took over as the head men’s basketball coach at Marquette. On Saturday, Zaide Lowery, a guard in the class of 2023, announced that he has received said offer from the Golden Eagles.

I have to scrape together information on Lowery, and most of it is coming from his tweets and retweets if we’re being honest about it. Part of that is because he doesn’t appear to have a 247 Sports page at this point, but that’s not completely surprising given how off-kilter last summer was for the recruiting scouts. Lowery says that he’s a 6’4” guard in his Twitter bio, which is the same height listed on his MaxPreps page and his Verbal Commits page. Then again, they might have just gotten that from his bio, too.

Lowery is from Missouri, where he attends Kickapoo High School in Springfield. That’s in the southwest part of the state for those of you not up to speed on your Missouri geography. I can’t seem to track stats for the year down for Lowery, but that’s probably okay. As it turns out, he didn’t even play varsity basketball for the whole season:

Not even a full time high school varsity player as a sophomore this past season, and now he’s got a high major offer to play college hoops. That’s pretty great. From scrolling through Lowery’s tweets, Marquette is just his second ever offer following along behind one from Missouri State in late June, so that’s even better news for Lowery.

Speaking of Missouri State, here’s 60-ish seconds of highlights of him playing in the Missouri state final four on their home court. Again, this is after not starting the year on the varsity team, and oh by the way, Kickapoo won the Class 6 state title.

Let’s go a little more recent. I tracked down this rundown of recent club activity through Lowery’s tweets, and it’s a fresh scouting report that was published on July 10th:

Fresh off a state championship in Missouri with Kickapoo High School, Lowery was impressive today with Missouri Flight. The 6-foot-4 shooting guard is an athletic prospect that can score if from all spots. He attacks the rim and can throw down some nasty buckets at the rim. With Missouri State Head Coach Dana Ford sitting courtside, Lowery put on a solid show, scoring 13 points. He has recently also heard from Oklahoma, Purdue and Air Force. At the end of the day I really like a prospect that goes hard and has a high-level motor. Lowery is that guy.

Seems good. Lowery also put up this 60 second highlight reel from a 31 point performance for Missouri Flight on the club circuit. He put this up two hours after posting about his offer from Marquette, so there’s a non-zero chance that the offer had something to do with the performance.

Taking how Lowery’s 2020-21 season went into account and the overall underscouting of the Class of 2023 due to the pandemic last summer, I’m willing to believe that we’re only seeing the surface get scratched for his recruiting. I would suspect that Marquette won’t be the last high major to offer him a spot this week, much less this month.

Scholarship chart time!

Until we start to get some 2022 commitments, it’s hard to say what Marquette does or does not need to bring in for the Class of 2023. There are no projected seniors on the 2022-23 team, so Shaka Smart is either going to A) pocket some scholarships to give himself freshmen in 2023 or B) go heavy in 2022 and just roll the dice on what happens in 2023. There are way too many questions for 2023 at this point, but if there’s a spot available, MU could probably do a lot worse than a wing with high end athleticism.