It would’ve been an appealing little story to report that when 17-year-old Kylan Boswell scored his first points as a collegian on Monday, he became the youngest Arizona basketball player ever to do so.
Those of us on press row could’ve labeled him “The Babe” or something catchy.
Alas, on Dec. 3, 1975, 7-foot freshman Brian Jung, the Arizona co-player of the year from Canyon del Oro High School, made a free throw in the UA’s victory over Idaho.
Jung was 17 years, three months and three days old.
Boswell was 17 years, six months and 19 days old when he swished an 18-footer Monday night, giving the Wildcats a 21-4 lead in a 117-75 blasting of the visiting Nicholls Colonels.
Until then, the youngest Wildcat of the Pac-12 years to score was Gilbert Arenas, 17 years, 10 months and 10 days, in 1999-2000’s opening win over Kansas State.
But who cares, right? If you can play at Arizona’s level, it doesn’t matter if you’re a Babe or Agent Zero, as Arenas soon became known.
Arenas went on to average 15.4 points per game for the Wildcats as a freshman, was the club’s leading scorer in its 2001 climb to the national championship game and went on to earn $163 million in the NBA.
Jung? He only scored 50 points as a Wildcat before transferring to Northwestern, where he became a starting center.
Who knows how things will turn out in such an unpredictable game?
Now comes Boswell, once rated the No. 3 point guard in the high school class of 2023 before he reclassified to the Class of 2022, which wasn’t a move available to Jung or Arenas in previous basketball generations.
The basketball book on Boswell is in Chapter 2.
In Chapter 1, he was a road warrior, playing for his hometown (Champaign, Illinois) Urbana Middle School Tigers before embarking on a three-year odyssey in Southern California and Phoenix in which he played for the Colony High School Titans, the Centennial High School Huskies and the Arizona Compass Prep Dragons.
It was during those road stops that Boswell became eye candy for every Top 25 coach in college basketball, including Arizona’s Tommy Lloyd, who saw a potential game-changing point guard — think of UCLA’s Tyger Campbell — and successfully persuaded Boswell to become a Wildcat.
It was a risk for both parties, which UA fans have witnessed twice with “reclassified” freshmen Emmanuel Akot and Nico Mannion, both of whom arrived and departed Tucson with unsatisfying results.
Akot, a 6-7 wing from Canada via Utah’s Wasatch Academy, was a bust at Arizona, averaging 3.1 points per game in 1½ seasons before transferring to Boise State and, more recently, Western Kentucky. Akot was 18 when he moved to Tucson. Now, at 23, he’s still trying to become “The Man,” this time in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
Mannion, something of a basketball prodigy by the time he helped Paradise Valley’s Pinnacle High School to back-to-back state championships, accelerated his high school academic schedule and graduated a year ahead of his class, arriving in Tucson as the next-big-thing at Point Guard U.
But Mannion often seemed to suffocate in Sean Miller’s stodgy offensive system and entered the NBA draft after averaging 14 points per game in the pandemic-truncated 2019-20 season. He played in 30 games for the Golden State Warriors before signing a two-year deal with Italy’s Virtus Bologna franchise, where he now averages 9.8 points per game.
It’s not that reclassifying doesn’t work at the elite level.
Kentucky’s Karl-Anthony Towns, Kansas’ Andrew Wiggins and Duke’s Marvin Bagley Jr., among others, played like college super seniors when they were, by age and experience, high school seniors.
In his 23-minute, eight-point performance Monday against Nicholls, Boswell showed no trace of being jittery or bright-eyed.
“He looked really efficient in the second half,” said Lloyd, who publicly has tried to minimize expectations for Boswell, who missed almost all of the September-October training camp sessions while recovering from a foot injury.
But McKale Center regulars who have watched Point Guard U production for 40 years know a legitimate prospect when they see one, and thus far, in limited minutes, Boswell looks like he made the right choice by eschewing his senior year of high school.
Reclassifying is clearly a risky move. The arguments against doing so are that (1) you miss a year of setting your emotional and physical foundation — your maturity — and (2) you miss out on the social highlights of your senior year in high school.
But since Boswell had jumped to three different schools in high school, it was clear basketball, not the prom, was his priority.
His mother, Ashley Boswell, told the Champaign News-Gazette of Illinois that Kylan’s move to California three years ago “was very emotional and very scary,” but that the family didn’t think he could get the exposure and high-level competition he sought in Illinois.
Arizona's Kylan Boswell pressures the ball near the top of the key during last week's exhibition win over Western Oregon.
In his NCAA debut Monday, Boswell played more than half the game for the nation’s No. 17 team. So he’s 17, so what? He looked like he belonged.
He is a Babe no more.
Contact sports columnist Greg Hansen at 520-573-4362 or ghansen@tucson.com. On Twitter: @ghansen711
No. 17 Arizona thumped Nicholls 117-75 Monday night for the Wildcats' season opener at McKale Center. Pelle Larsson recorded his first-career double-double with 16 points and 10 rebounds. Azuolas Tubelis led the Wildcats with 23 points, seven rebounds and six assists.
