SEATTLE — Daejon Davis knows all about the glory days of the Lorenzo Romar era, about the Washington Huskies teams that played in the NCAA tournament, about Brandon Roy and Nate Robinson and Will Conroy.
He just isn’t old enough to have actually watched them.
So as a Seattle native, he says, and as a standout prospect at Lakeside School, Davis wants to experience firsthand what it’s like to see the Huskies succeed again on the basketball court, where they’ve missed the last four NCAA tournaments.
It was with that in mind, then, that Davis, a 6-foot-3, 175-pound guard who will be a junior this upcoming season, used his Twitter page on Tuesday morning to announce a commitment to play basketball for the Huskies.
“I think that’s going to be important to show the guys that are coming up right now,” Davis said. “I know that’s something I missed on, even though I know everything about it. I think it’s going to be a good thing for the up and coming Seattle basketball players to see that things can be done in our hometown, and that the UW basketball we’ve seen these past couple years isn’t really UW basketball.”
Davis is considered one of the 60 best recruits in the 2017 class by each of the four major recruiting outlets — Scout, Rivals, ESPN and 247 Sports — and averaged 20.1 points and 11.0 rebounds per game for Lakeside as a sophomore.
“I’d say I’m a playmaker,” Davis said. “I can do a little bit of everything. I’m a good defender, really athletic, I’m a winner.”
The earliest he can sign a binding national letter of intent is November 2016. But he said he wanted to commit now “to start a trend in my class” — Garfield High School guard Jaylen Nowell, another top UW target, is also in the 2017 class — and because an unofficial visit to the campus on Monday led him to feel “like it was home.”
Davis also said he’s known Conroy, now in his first season as a UW assistant, since he was in elementary school, and that “he’s like my big brother.”
The Huskies were the first team to offer Davis a scholarship after they began recruiting him last summer. He also has offers from Gonzaga, California and Washington State, among others.
His commitment continues a remarkable recruiting run for Romar and his staff. The Huskies signed an eight-player recruiting class in 2015 that Scout.com ranked as the sixth-best in the country — including five top-100 prospects, all freshmen — and last week received an oral commitment from 5-star prospect Markelle Fultz, one of the highest-rated guards in the 2016 class.
The Huskies also signed New Zealand center Sam Timmins in the 2016 class, and received an oral commitment from high-school sophomore Jontay Porter, a 2018 prospect.
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