Inside The Huskies

Battle Ends Up With West Virginia, an Ex-Husky Landing Spot

The Mountaineers pick up their third former UW player.

Dan Raley

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The University of Washington basketball team was nearing the end of a horrendous 5-21 season when someone made the offhand comment that RaeQuan Battle, by now seated at the far end of the bench and no longer playing, was the type of player who might end up at Gonzaga and flourish.

OK, so we had his final destination wrong.

On Wednesday, the 6-foot-5 former Husky guard from Tulalip, Washington, announced he would next play for West Virginia after spending a pair of seasons in the Big Sky with Montana State, all of this coming after he exited Mike Hopkins' program in Montlake looking to resurrect his career.

Over the past three seasons, 15 UW basketball players have transferred out, though just a handful have been painful losses.

Keyon Menifield, a freshman guard who recently left the Huskies for Arkansas, was one of them.

Battle, so long and lean and promising offensively on the basketball floor, is another.

He heads to a Big 12 program that has been a landing spot gladly welcoming one-time Husky players on the move, with West Virginia this past season adding former UW guard Erik Stevenson and forward Emmitt Matthews.

Battle, who averaged 17.7 points per game this winter, led Montana State to the NCAA tournament for a second consecutive season. He was named first-team All-Big Sky and Big Sky tournament MVP. He shot 47 percent from the floor.

Once he entered the transfer portal, Battle received 17 offers to relocate, among them reportedly Alabama, Clemson, Georgia Tech, Kansas State, LSU, Oklahoma, Texas and Wake Forest.

Pac-12 entries UCLA, Oregon and California made a big pitch for Battle, as well. The Huskies, it seems, didn't make an attempt to reclaim what was once theirs. 

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Dan Raley
DAN RALEY

Dan Raley has worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, as well as for MSN.com and Boeing, the latter as a global aerospace writer. His sportswriting career spans four decades and he's covered University of Washington football and basketball during much of that time. In a working capacity, he's been to the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the MLB playoffs, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship and countless Final Fours and bowl games.

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