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Players to watch: Shane Rector, St. Raymond
St. Raymond rising senior Shane Rector has offers from Dayton, Providence, Hofstra and UMass.
Damion Reid
In his first two years of high-level varsity basketball at St. Raymond, (Sugar) Shane Rector has played a supporting role to stars Daniel Dingle and Kerwin Okoro.
Dingle is about to enter his freshman year at Temple and Okoro is now at Iowa State.
The lone returning starter from a CHSAA Class AA intersectional championship squad is the 6-foot-1 Rector, who is poised to become one of the city’s top guards this winter.
Rector showed glimpses last year, coming up big in some of St. Raymond’s biggest wins, including a 22-point performance in a 55-51 win at Lincoln in February. That came after quietly battling an ankle injury through much of the season.
“On a night when our two go-to guys struggle and don’t crack double figures, we get a great game from Shane Rector, who’s becoming now one of the top guards in the city,” former Ravens coach Oliver Antigua said after the game. “He played hurt in the first part of the year with a bad ankle, but now he’s got his bounce back. He’s athletic, he can do it all.”
Rector, who is equally adept at scoring the basketball as he is distributing it, followed up a stellar junior season with a great spring and summer on the AAU circuit.
He displayed his athleticism with a dunk over St. John’s-bound Chris Obekpa, a 6-foot-8 forward, at the IS8 Spring Classic in April, a video that went viral and he competed in the Nike Global Challenge in July.
The colleges are certainly taking notice. Rector lists offers from Dayton, Providence, Hofstra and UMass and has interest from N.C. State, Georgetown, Iowa State, Pittsburgh, Arizona, Oklahoma and Stanford.
“He’s had a great summer and really spent a lot of time working on his game in the offseason,” current St. Raymond coach Jorge Lopez said. “This year is going to be huge for him and I think he’s going to show he’s probably one of the best players in the city.”
Visit MSGVarsity.com each weekday this summer as we unveil the next athlete on our Players to watch list. Click here for the complete list.
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