Fred Hoiberg and his staff assembled the best recruiting class in program history, and they did that in the midst of a recruiting dead period that lasted 444 days.
That meant no in-person evaluations and no visits, official or unofficial. That dead period finally came to an end when the calendar turned from May to June, and that means the coaches are going to be busy for the next couple of months.
“June is going to be an absolutely crazy month,” Hoiberg said on a recent episode of Sports Nightly. “We’re really excited. We get the opportunity to get players back on our campus to show everything. You can do it virtually all you want but to get potential student-athletes on your campus to see all the great things that we have here at Nebraska is very important part of the recruiting process. It’s going to be very busy, but it’s also very exciting.
“It’s a very exciting time to try to add the right players to your roster in the future and we feel very good about the high school kids that we have coming on their visits in the month of June, and then once July hits they’re opening up the recruiting period again.”
Currently, the Huskers are scheduled to welcome 10 2022 or 20223 prospects to Lincoln for official or unofficial visits.
The festivities begin this weekend as Nebraska will host a pair of 2022 recruits for officials visits Friday through Sunday.
The first is Isaac Traudt, the 4-star forward from Grand Island with offers from both Nebraska and Creighton as well as a host of others including North Carolina, Michigan State, Virginia and Kansas. He’s ranked 50th in the 247Sports Composite rankings and averaged 25.3 points and 9.4 rebounds per game for the Islanders as a junior.
The other official visitor is Chance Westry, a 6-foot-4 guard ranked 33rd in the 2022 composite rankings. Nebraska offered Westry almost a year ago, and he also holds offers from Maryland, Syracuse, Michigan, Florida and several others.
The Huskers will also host a pair of 5-star 2023 prospects over the weekend.
Simeon Wilcher, the eighth-ranked player and third-ranked point guard in the 2023 class, will get a chance to check out the campus as his older brother, C.J. Wilcher, moves in. The older Wilcher transferred from Xavier to Nebraska after the 2020-21 season and will have four years of eligibility in Lincoln.
Omaha Biliew, a 6-foot-8 forward from Waukee, Iowa, will also take an unofficial on Sunday. Biliew was born in Omaha but moved to Iowa when he was 2. The fifth-ranked player in the 2023 class is running with MOKAN Elite EYBL this summer.
Nebraska will host another in-state target for an official visit next week as well. Millard North forward Jasen Green, a 3-star prospect ranked 141st in 2022, will visit June 11-13. In addition to Nebraska, Green holds offers from Stanford, Kansas State, TCU, Wake Forest and Iowa State. He helped the Mustangs with the 2021 Class A state championship while averaging 12.3 points and 6.7 rebounds alongside Gonzaga commit Hunter Sallis and Loyola of Chicago commit Saint Thomas.
After Green leaves, the Huskers will welcome Malik Dia, a power forward from Nashville, Tennessee, for an official visit June 14-16. In addition to Nebraska, Did holds offers from Creighton, TCU and St. John’s.
Nebraska will also hold official visits for Los Angeles guard Ramel Lloyd Jr. (No. 67) June 18-20, Fresno guard Joseph Hunter (82) June 20-22, Beacon Falls, Connecticut, guard Avery Brown (No. 133) June 21-23 and Nashville forward Braeden Moore (No. 162) June 25-27.
Based on the visitors, it appears Nebraska is prioritizing point/combo-guards and skilled forwards in 2022.
June is for hosting visitors, but the end of the dead period also means the return of live evaluation periods in July. Coaches will once again be able to hit the road to see players compete in tournaments in person rather than trying to follow along as best they can on low-quality streams. The grassroots live periods this year will be July 8-11, 16-18 and 23-25.
“They’ve got a couple proposals about how it’s going to work, but to get out on the road again, be able to evaluate and show support to the kids that are really immortal priorities, it’s going to be good,” Hoiberg said. “It’s great just to have some normalcy back, not only the recruiting but also we really didn’t have an offseason last year, so we weren’t able to work. We had a whole new team basically that we were trying to prep going into the year without much of an offseason besides some individual work just because of everything going on with the virus.”
June is big for potential future Huskers, but it also means Nebraska’s current players will head to campus to get summer workouts started. According the Hoiberg, players will begin returning to campus throughout this week and workouts will begin June 9.
Jacob Padilla has been writing for Hail Varsity since 2015. He covers football, volleyball men’s basketball and prep sports. He also co-hosts the Nebraska Preps Postgame and Nebraska Shootaround podcasts for the Hurrdat Media and Hail Varsity podcast networks. His love of basketball can best be described as an obsession and if you need to find him, he’s probably in a gym somewhere watching, coaching or playing hoops.
