Recruiting Report: Zeke Nnaji (2019)
It’s been a whirlwind of a year for Zeke Nnaji and he’s riding the power of this push continuing to find success. Nnaji has grown to 6-foot-11 and his increased successful play landed him at the U17 national tryouts for USA Basketball.
Nnaji did not make the cut to 18 as he was hurt on the final day of the tryouts but his fight to get to that level says a lot. Nnaji receiving this tryout from USA Basketball resulted in Zeke missing some college visits but Zeke has many interested parties who will wait until the end of the summer.
“I was going to do a lot of (them) in June, but I got invited to the USA team,” Zeke said. “I’m going to have to postpone a lot of those until August. I’m probably going to make my decision around the start of next season (in the fall). I was so happy (with the USA invite), didn’t expect it. It’s really humbling to represent the United States. Hopefully I can make the team (he said before the tryout).”
Zeke didn’t make the cut for that team, but he’s made the cut for many top college programs who have offered scholarships: Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Georgetown, Indiana, UCLA, Arizona, Purdue, and so many others.
Zeke has so many options now that it’s somewhat hard to keep track of those options. So, how does Zeke keep track of everything.
“My mom made a spreadsheet of all the coaches that have offered me (shown) interest,” Nnaji said. “We have different categories for all of the schools. We categorize them based on what we like and stuff like that.”
As Nnaji said, a decision won’t come until later in the fall and he won’t get out to many visits until August, so before that Zeke has three more events to play with D1 Minnesota.
“We did really well,” Zeke said of his D1 Minnesota team in the spring. “We had this one tough loss against Exum Elite but we played pretty well overall. We’re unselfish, we’re long, and we have great chemistry.”