There were few positives last season for the Seton Hall men’s basketball team, with injuries and inconsistency adding up to a 15-18 campaign. The offseason has held just the opposite, the program suddenly overflowing with current or future talented players.
The Pirates landed point guard Jaren Sina of Gill St. Bernard’s School of Gladstone, N.J., after he received his release from Northwestern in the wake of the firing of head coach Bill Carmody. Sina is expected to be part of an all-Garden State starting backcourt this winter with Texas transfer Sterling Gibbs of Scotch Plains. They will be joined by elite junior college wing Stephane Manga from Monroe College.
Fourth-year head coach Kevin Willard then went to work on his 2014 class. He picked up Newark (N.J.) East Side wing Ismael Sanogo in July, bruising highly rated forward Angel Delgado of Huntington Prep (West Va.) and the Dominican Republic in August and, this week, top city recruit Khadeen Carrington, a 6-foot-3 slashing guard from Bishop Loughlin in Brooklyn.
“It’s taken a lot of work to get to where we want to get to,” Willard told The Post. “It’s starting to pay off a little bit.”
The Pirates aren’t done. They will host Lincoln High School star Isaiah Whitehead Saturday on an unofficial visit and are heavily involved with 100 Linden (N.J.) senior forward Quadri Moore, who is also looking at Cincinnati, Miami, Wake Forest and Temple and a consensus top 100 ranked recruit.
“They’re starting to get a little traction,” Scout.com national recruiting analyst Evan Daniels said. “The Angel Delgado commitment was a big one and arguably the biggest pickup Seton Hall has had in years.”
Whitehead, ranked 12th overall in the nation by Scout, also is considering Pittsburgh, UCLA, Minnesota, Syracuse and Louisville, among others, and would be the highest rated recruit to pick Seton Hall in years. He is intrigued by the possibility of leading the Hall back to its glory days, as the face of the program, a source said.
Sina’s and Delgado’s commitments had to do, at least partly, with the new additions to the staff.
Sina has a close bond with assistant coach Fred Hill, the former Rutgers head coach who was an assistant at Northwestern before Carmody was let go, and said his hiring added to Sina’s comfort level at Seton Hall. In the case of Delgado, sources said bringing in former St. Raymond High School head coach Oliver Antigua, who has yet to be officially introduced by the school but has been hired, a source said, factored into the pledge. Antigua has coached Delgado on the Dominican national team and the two are close, the source said.
“The two guys we added to the staff are not only great recruiters, but good coaches and good people,” Willard said.
The addition of Antigua, who spent last year on Steve Masiello’s staff at Manhattan College, may help Seton Hall recruiting the city, New York Lightning AAU coach Dana Dingle said. Now they have two coaches, in Antigua and Queens product Shaheen Holloway, who have city connections. And, as Willard said, when he was at Iona his staff made a habit out of successfully recruiting players from the five boroughs, like NBA guard Scott Machado.
“They have more ties to New York then had in the past,” Dingle said. “They’re able to get through more doors than before. The more people you know, the better chances you have.”
“One kid sees somebody else [go there] and it becomes more attractive.”
That was the case with Carrington, following in the footsteps of his AAU teammate Delgado. Willard and Co. obviously would love to see Whitehead, another New Yorker and the city’s crown jewel, do the same.
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Iowa State is hosting Our Savior New American (L.I.) forwards Cheick Diallo and Kassoum Yakwe on an unofficial visit this weekend.
Manhattan and Rhode Island stopped by Wings Academy on Thursday to see point guard Desure Buie, a junior. Both schools have offered Buie a scholarship.
St. John’s offered Roselle (N.J.) Catholic junior Isaiah Briscoe a scholarship, joining his long list of suitors that includes Arizona, Syracuse, Ohio State and UCLA.
Bishop Loughlin shooting guard Mike Williams, who has committed to Rutgers, will take an official visit to the Piscataway, N.J. school this weekend with fellow commits Bishop Daniels and D.J. Foreman.
Iona Prep junior Matt Ryan will take an unofficial visit to Rutgers this weekend and Notre Dame next weekend. The talented wing has more than 20 scholarship offers from a mixture of mid-major and high-major programs such as the Irish, Pittsburgh, Creighton, Boston College, Iowa State and Fordham.
Manhattan landed the fourth pledge in its 2014 recruiting class, sharpshooting forward Zane Waterman of Fayetteville (N.C.) Academy. The 6-foot-8 senior, who also considered Duquesne, Charlotte and St. Joseph’s, joins Nazareth duo Samson Akilo and Samson Usilo and St. Thomas More (Conn.) wing Calvin Crawford as Jaspers commits.
Queens point guard Trey Dickerson, who signed with Murray State but received his release recently when he opted to leave, will spend this year at JUCO Williston State in North Dakota. Dickerson, who spent most of his high school career in California after transferring from Christ the King, is qualified and plans to be in junior college for just one year.