Utah men's basketball coach Larry Krystkowiak completed the highest-ranked recruiting class of his nine-year tenure and Ute women's coach Lynne Roberts added a legacy player among her three recruits Wednesday during the November signing period.
The 247Sports ranking of Krystkowiak’s class dropped slightly to No. 7, as Texas Tech and Virginia rose on signing day, but that remains a validation of his four players. Pelle Larsson, Caleb Lohner and Ian Martinez are four-star recruits; Mason Falslev is a three-star player.
Roberts’ No. 20-ranked class (ESPN) features North Summit High School guard Kennady McQueen, whose mother, Melanee, was a two-time All-Western Athletic Conference player for Utah.
Falslev, a receiver for the Sky View High School football team that will play Friday in the Class 4A semifinals at Rice-Eccles Stadium, intends to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints before enrolling at Utah in 2022. Krystkowiak has kept one scholarship open on the current roster. With one senior in the program and three freshmen coming in 2020, he’s apparently allowing for one case of attrition.
Falslev, a 6-foot-3 shooting guard, led Sky View to the 4A basketball championship as a junior, averaging 24.1 points and 5.2 assists for the Cache Valley school. Falslev “brings toughness and a winning spirit,” Krystkowiak said in a news release.
Larsson, a 6-5 combo guard, averaged 17.9 points and 6.3 rebounds for his team in Sweden as “one of the premier guards in Europe,” Krystkowiak said.
The 6-6, 200-pound Lohner's “physicality” should help him adapt to college basketball, Krystkowiak said. Lohner averaged 17.8 points and 8.5 rebounds as a sophomore at Flower Mound High School in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, then transferred to Wasatch Academy in Mount Pleasant last winteer and posted 10.4 points and 5.4 rebounds for a nationally ranked team.
Martinez, a 6-3 shooting guard, is a son of Ute assistant coach Henry Martinez. He’s playing at J Serra Catholic High School in Southern California, where he scored 26 points in the title game of the North Orange County Championships and was named the tournament MVP. He’s known for “a great combination of athleticism, skill and IQ,” Krystkowiak said.
McQueen is No. 12 for North Summit, but plans to wear her mother’s No. 24 for Utah. Known as Melanee Brooks-McQueen in her college days, she also made the jump from North Summit in tiny Coalville to Utah’s program, so her daughter knows what to expect — although she’s joining a Pac-12 program.
“It will be really intense; the game will speed up a ton,” the 5-10 McQueen said, but she's confident that her AAU experience will help her adjust.
“The great thing about Kennady is she’s so determined,” her mother said. “The harder something is or the bigger the moment, she gets stronger.”
Roberts has tracked McQueen since arriving at Utah in 2015 and is “so impressed with how she has developed into one of the best players in the country,” she said. McQueen, who averaged 21.5 points, 6.8 rebounds and 4.9 assists for the Class 2A school as a junior, is “competitive, athletic and can shoot like crazy.”
McQueen and Peyton McFarland, a 6-4 post player from Boise (Idaho) High School, are Top 100 recruits. Donna Ntambue, a 5-9 guard from Montreal, will extend Utah’s Canadian pipeline as her country’s No. 13-ranked prospect.
