The spring grassroots club circuit is in full effect, so it’s not surprising that the Marquette men’s basketball staff is hard at work identifying the future of the program. That identification process includes issuing scholarship offers, and we’ve got a pair of new offers to Class of 2025 prospects to talk about today. Let’s get right to it!

Amari Evans

This is going to take a minute to unpack, and if I get something wrong here, I apologize to everyone involved.

Amari Evans is a Class of 2025 prospect listed by 247 Sports as a 6’4”, 180 pound combo guard. They list him as attending Bishop Canevin High School in Pittsburgh, and if you scroll back through his Twitter enough, you can find highlights of him playing for Canevin at the Petersen Events Center. That was in March 2022, though. As you scroll back to the present, it becomes apparent that Evans is now at Our Savior Lutheran in The Bronx in New York City. Sure, fine, whatever. It’s also worth noting that Our Savior Lutheran is part of the Expanded Overtime Elite Universe, as OSL’s basketball team is part of Overtime Elite’s league, as much as one can have a high school league with three OE teams in Atlanta and three other schools in three different states.

I don’t know about other action for Evans and OSL, but we do have stats for 11 games of OE League competition, nine regular season and two playoffs. In the regular season, Evans averaged 3.4 points and 2.8 rebounds per game, but shot just 22% from long range. He had a 10 point/7 rebound game in the playoffs, but went 0-for-7 from long range in two playoff games. Take all of this with a grain of salt, or several if you want, as Allen was only a sophomore this season.

Can I interest you in some highlights from this spring, as Evans showed out with his New Heights Lightning club team?

Amari Allen

After Amari Evans’ somewhat convoluted and very 2023 high school path, it’s nice to see a straight forward old-timey story like Amari Allen presents to us. Allen is listed as a 6’7”, 180 pound small forward by 247 Sports, and in their internal rankings, he’s a four-star prospect and is ranked #37 in the country for the Class of 2025 at the moment. Totally normal stuff there, and we get even more normal with how high school has gone for him so far. Allen spent his first year at Kaukauna High School up in the Appleton area, briefly made a commitment to attend a prep school in Tennessee, but ultimately changed that to IMG Academy in Florida a month later. See! Normal stuff.

Personally, I think it is very good for Marquette to recruit top 50 prospects from Wisconsin. You can disagree with me if you want.

As always when it comes to guys playing high school basketball in this state, Wisconsin Sports Network is highly useful. As a freshman at Kaukauna, Allen averaged 22.7 points per game in 24 appearances, connecting on 36% of his long range attempts. He also averaged 5.9 rebounds, 2.3 assists, and 1.8 steals per game.

By the way: It seems that the offer to Allen came after he made an unofficial visit to Milwaukee.

Here’s a three minute highlight reel from a 32 point/9 rebound game that Allen had at Kaukauna:

Here’s some highlights of Allen just a few weeks ago:

Scholarship chart time!

For the moment, it appears that Marquette will have three scholarships coming available in the fall of 2025 after Kam Jones, David Joplin, and Stevie Mitchell wrap up their collegiate eligibility. There’s also the possibility that 2025 could be coming on the heels of an extra season of eligibility for Oso Ighodaro or Tyler Kolek... or even Olivier-Maxence Prosper, but I don’t expect that after he’s at least testing the NBA Draft waters here in 2023. In any case, with Jones and Joplin projected on their way out the door at that point, it certainly seems like both Evans and Allen would fit into a spot in the roster as Marquette will need to bolster the depth at wing. Of course, it’s a long time between now and November 2025, so who knows what the roster will need the most by then.