Inside The Huskies

UW Basketball Remains in Pursuit of Top 20 Player from SoCal, Africa

Shooting guard Tounde Yessoufou has narrowed his college choices to 10 schools.

Dan Raley

Tounde Yessoufou has the UW among 10 finalists.
Tounde Yessoufou has the UW among 10 finalists. / UW

Ten months after he toured the University of Washington, even following a change in basketball coaches in Montlake, 5-star shooting guard Tounde Yessoufou has the Huskies listed among his 10 college choices.

While that still might seem like a lot, the fact that new coach Danny Sprinkle and his staff feel confident enough to battle the blue-blood programs for this high-level prospect from the class of 2025 is a marked change from former coach Mike Hopkins, who in recent seasons preferred to stock up on transfer portal players.

On Wednesday, the 6-foot-5, 210-pound Yessoufou from St. Joseph High School in Santa Maria, California -- a school that decades ago sent eventual Rose Bowl MVP quarterback Mark Brunell to the UW and employed Brunell's father, Dave, as its athletic director -- revealed his remaining college options as follows: Arizona, Arizona State, Baylor, Connecticut, Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, UCLA, USC and Washington.

This is not a one-off either. Ten days earlier, 5-star 6-foot-5 guard Darryn Peterson, an Ohio native, announced his final college choices consist of Kansas, Kentucky, Louisville, Ohio State, USC and the UW.

Yessoufou originally hails from Benin, a small coastal African country of 13.35 million people that borders Nigeria. to the west.

He arrived in Southern California to play basketball as a freshman in 2021 and was an immediate success for Santa Maria High, averaging 26.4 points, 12.3 rebounds and 2.9 blocks per game for a 27-4 team.

As a sophomore in 2022-23, Yessoufou increased his scoring to 27.8 and averaged 10.7 and 2.9 assists per outing for a 28-7 team.

This past season, Yessoufou was even better as a scorer, averaging 32.3 points and 10.2 rebounds per game for a 31-4 team.

Over the summer, he's been one of the top players in the NIKE Elite Youth basketball League (EYBL), scoring 21.8 and shooting 53 percent from the field against his peers up and down the East Coast.

Yessoufou initially received a scholarship offer from Hopkins' staff and was photographed with former UW standout and assistant coach Quincy Pondexter on his unofficial visit last September. Pondexter is now at USC, which iis aggressively pursuing the guard, who recently visited that school.

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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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