• Much attention was given to Gilbert Perry High School basketball whiz Koa Peat in his Tucson debut appearance last week, a 64-48 victory at Tucson High. Peat is Arizona’s No. 1 recruiting target, recognized as a top-10 prospect in the Class of 2025. But his visit to Tucson didn’t match that of Mike Bibby’s 1996 visit to Salpointe Catholic, when his Phoenix Shadow Mountain team fell to the Lancers, 105-95, with Arizona standouts Miles Simon, Jason Terry and A.J. Bramlett sitting in the front row. Bibby scored 39 that night, Salpointe center Brian Smith outplayed Bibby, scoring 41 points, helping him earn a scholarship to New Mexico. Interest was so intense that fire marshals closed the doors 45 minutes before tipoff, which even meant late-arriving UA assistant coach Jim Rosborough was denied admission to the game.
Perry’s Koa Peat (10) slaps the hand of Tucson’s Malaki Cunningham-Hiadzi (22), stopping his shot in the second quarter of their game in Tucson, Jan. 7, 2025.
• It could be that the next No. 1 basketball recruiting target of Tommy Lloyd will be a familiar face, sort of. Jason Gardner Jr., now a sophomore guard at Fishers High School near Indianapolis, is averaging 17 points and 4.8 assists for the No. 1-ranked team in Indiana. Gardner has already received scholarship offers from Purdue, Notre Dame, Indiana and Cincinnati. His father, of course, Jason Gardner, has his jersey retired on the wall at McKale Center and is now the UA’s director of player relations. I watched highlight videos of the young Gardner the other day; he is an attacker, a relentless, aggressive player just like his father was.
• The ongoing Los Angeles wildfires brought back memories to many of those connected to UA athletics. Rich Tomey, son of former UA football coach Dick Tomey, said that the home his family lived in from 1970-77, while his father coached at UCLA, was burned down. So was the boyhood home of his next door neighbor, Mark Harlan, a UA grad and associate athletic director, who is now the AD at Utah. Carrie Cecil, wife of Arizona college football Hall of Fame safety Chuck Cecil, drove to Los Angeles to prepare their Manhattan Beach house and made it available to those from Pacific Palisades whose homes had been destroyed by fire. Talk about heroes.
• Tucson mayor Regina Romero examined the Randolph Golf Complex on Friday, the early stages of her insane “Randolph Reimagined" project that could spend $40 million or more to put a walking path between the Randolph and Dell Urich golf courses. Earlier in the week, people from a Minnesota firm that has been paid $400,000 to design changes to both courses were on the course to examine Dell Urich’s Nos. 2 and 3 holes, which would be compromised for the mayor’s unnecessary changes. What a foolish idea. The only changes that need to be made at the Randolph Golf Complex are to rebuild eight ancient, don’t-touch-anything bathrooms, fix the cracked and broken cart paths, and remove dozens of dead trees.
• Perhaps the most important person in the UA athletic department the last few months (and the next few, too) is Gaizka Crowley, the general manager of the school’s football department. He has captained the 24/7 transfer portal drama that has seen 31 players leave Arizona and 24 sign with the Wildcats, through Friday. Crowley, in his first year at Arizona, is paid $150,000, which is half of the lowest-paid of Arizona’s 10 assistant coaches. I’m not suggesting Crowley is underpaid, but I would guess that five years from now, the GM of a Power 4 football program will be paid $500,000 or more, given the importance of that position.
Arizona general manager Gaizka Crowley got his start in the scouting business for the company that eventually became XOS Digital.
