Inside The Huskies

Huskies Offer African Basketball Player Relocated to SoCal

Tounde Yessoufou is a wing and a big scorer in the Class of 2025.

Dan Raley

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While it's hard to gauge the future for the University of Washington basketball program, Mike Hopkins' coaching staff continues to soldier on, look ahead and pursue elite talent.

On Friday, the Huskies  made a scholarship offer to Tounde Yessoufou, considered one of the West Coast's top players for 2025. Basketball Tribune calls him the state's top player in his class.

A 27.8-point scorer this past season as a sophomore, the 6-foot-6 wing is a West African who plays for St. Joseph's High School in Santa Maria, California — the same school that sent football quarterback Mike Brunell to the UW three decades and employed his father Dave as athletic director.

Yessoufou hails from the French-speaking nation of Benin, which has a student exchange program with this coastal Southern California region.

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A year ago, he averaged 26.4 points and 12.3 rebounds per outing for a 27-4 team before bumping his numbers to 27.8 and 10.7 for a 28-7 club this past winter. 

Schools are just beginning to court him, with UCLA, Arizona, Arizona State, Washington State, Portland, Cal Poly and UC Santa Barbara also offering.

If there's a drawback to his game, Yessoufou needs work on his 3-point shot, hitting just 29 percent while averaging three attempts per game. At his size, an outside game is mandatory.

Yessoufou ended up at St. Joseph's because an older friend from home, Candace Kperikou, had enrolled at the school first. She's committed to play college basketball for Washington State. 

Should Yessoufou end up at the UW, he would give the Huskies a pair of Africans on the roster. 

Samuel Ariyibi, a 6-foot-8 power forward from Lagos, Nigeria, has been with the Huskies for two seasons, though he's appeared in just four games because of persistent foot injury. 

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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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