Cal Basketball: Ex-Summer League Sidekick Matt Bradley Praises Jarred Hyder

Recently signed transfer guard Jarred Hyder won’t be a complete stranger to everyone on the Cal basketball team.

Matt Bradley, coming off a sophomore season in which he earned second-team All-Pac-12 honors, played summer ball with Hyder, who attended a rival high school in San Bernardino.

Hyder comes to Berkeley from Fresno State, where he averaged 9.1 points and 3.1 assists as a freshman last season. Hyder started 24 games for the Bulldogs.

“We played a couple years of summer ball together,” said Bradley, who is one year older than Hyder. “Me and him were always a good 1-2 punch on the floor.”

Bradley said Hyder, who stands 6-foot-3, is primarily a point guard but also can play off the ball.

“He’s a really good competitor. He plays to win. Great defender. Really good shooter from outside,” Bradley said. “He’s a team guy. He puts the team first ahead of himself.”

That was even the case in AAU ball, which often prompts players to worry first and foremost about their own performance in front of college recruiters. Not so with Hyder on their San Bernardino-tased Team Eleate, according to Bradley.

“He did what was best for the team even though there’s a bunch of college coaches out there,” Bradley said. “He was just really playing to win. That says a lot about somebody, especially on the AAU stage.”

Bradley described Hyder as “a dual threat,” a good distributor and a good scorer. He could share the point guard spot with sophomore-to-be Joel Brown, who started 17 games this past season, or they could be on the floor together, Bradley said.

“I like how they're interchangeable and how they can play off each other,” he said.

Hyder still must receive a waiver from the NCAA to be eligible to play next season as a transfer. Typically, a Division I basketball transfer is required to sit out one season, but the NCAA is considering a one-year waiver of that rule, given the state of things with the COVID-19 pandemic.

The NCAA Division I Board of Directors last week recommended against granting the transfer waiver, but is allowing the NCAA Division I Council to make the final call. That group’s vote is expected on May 20.

Bradley said he talked with Hyder about his transfer destination while he was considering BYU, Missouri, Washington State and Saint Mary’s.

“I knew at the end of the day he was going to make a decision based on what’s best for him,” Bradley said. “But I just tried to let him know (Cal) is a great school, not only academically but athletically.”

Bradley used his own experience at Cal as a selling point. He went from averaging 10.8 points as a freshman on an eight-win team to scoring 17.5 on a squad that posted 14 victories this past season.

“I showed him that I’m living proof of it. I’m flourishing. . . . I told him, `We played for the same AAU team, we might as well play for the same college team.’ He might have listened.“

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