The state of Arizona has a robust history of gold mines at such places as Turkey Creek, Antelope Hill, Vulture Mine, Pinto Creek and Superstition Mountain.
But UA basketball fans have their own gold mine: Phoenix high school basketball gyms, a lode of elite talent that the Wildcats have mined with unprecedented success.
When Phoenix ballplayer Cameron Holmes (No. 33 nationally) last week pledged to play for Tommy Lloyd‘s Wildcats, it added to the richest vein of in-state talent acquisition imaginable in the last 30 years.
Get this: Arizona has acquired 12 Arizona Gatorade Players of the Year dating to 2000, a period in which only one Tucsonan, Amphitheater’s Tim Derksen, and one other non-Phoenician, Page’s Matt Haryasz, won the award. It seems likely that Holmes, of Goodyear Millennium, will make it 13 Gatorade-to-Tucson awards in the spring.
More? In the national composite recruiting rankings of the last 30 years, nine of the top 14 in-state prospects chose Arizona: Mike Bibby, Richard Jefferson, Jerryd Bayless, Nico Mannion, Koa Peat, Nick Johnson, Deandre Ayton, Channing Frye and now Holmes. The others chose Duke, Colorado and Kentucky. The Sun Devils didn’t get a bite from No. 4 overall pick Cameron Williams, who chose Duke over Arizona on Friday.
Arizona’s Koa Peat high fives fans after the Wildcats win 84-49 over NAU at McKale Center, Nov. 11, 2025.
The real separator is that only one of those top 14 chose hometown ASU: point guard Jahii Carson.
Moreover, just one of the Arizona Gatorade Players of the Year from 2000-25 chose to play for the hometown Sun Devils. That was Taylor Rohde, who transferred to Alaska-Anchorage.
That’s unfathomable.
Gatorade POYs Peat (three awards), Mannion (two awards), Bayless (two awards), Alex Barcello (two awards), Dylan Anderson (two awards) and Frye chose Arizona.
This doesn’t just fall on ASU coach Bobby Hurley, but on his predecessors Rob Evans and Herb Sendek, whose inability to keep Phoenix Gatorade players of the year from going to Arizona, BYU, Dayton, Kansas, Stanford, Oregon and Creighton has kept the Sun Devils as a mid-major brand.
Hurley can’t escape criticism for his hometown recruiting failures. Since Hurley’s first season, 2015-16, only seven scholarship Phoenix players enrolled at ASU, and just two, guard Kodi Justice of Dobson High and forward Zylan Cheatham of South Mountain High, averaged double-figure scoring. But Cheatham, a transfer from San Diego State, and Marcus Bagley, played just one full year for the Sun Devils. Justice, a useful shooting guard, has been ASU’s top in-town recruit in that period. He averaged 7.9, 9.2 and 12.7.
Perhaps the most telling example of Hurley’s inability to develop local players was Shadow Mountain guard Jaelen House, son of ASU’s career scoring leader, Eddie House. Jaelen averaged 3.9 and 5.3 in two years in Tempe and then transferred to New Mexico, where he flourished, averaging 16 points two years in succession.
It’s not that Arizona’s athletic program hasn’t had similar issues with in-town recruiting. Elite-level football recruits Bijan Robinson, Bruno Fina, Lathan Ransom, Elijah Rushing and Keona Wilhite all chose to play out of town the last decade. It happens. Arizona’s football program of the last 10 seasons is comparable to Hurley’s basketball program of that period.
My choice as the best basketball team in ASU history, the 26-3 Elite Eight club of 1963 — ranked No. 4 in the Final AP poll — was led by two Phoenix stars: 6-7 Art Becker of Camelback High (19.1 average) and 6-3 Dennis Dairman of Phoenix North High (12.5 points). And if you prefer ASU’s last conference championship team, the ‘75 WAC champs, also an Elite Eight finisher at 25-4 and No. 8 in the final AP poll, was charged by two Phoenix players, Rudy White of Phoenix Union and Scott Lloyd of Phoenix East..
Those four leaders — Becker, Dairman, White and Lloyd — were today’s equivalent of those like Peat, Bayless, Bibby and now Cam Holmes: those who got away.
