Ex-Husky Commit McLaughlin Overcomes Past Tragedy, Ends Up in NCAAs

JaQuori McLaughlin was a 4-star point guard who committed to the University of Washington back in 2014 as a junior at Peninsula High School, only to withdraw his pledge six months later.

Lorenzo Romar was the Husky coach, not Mike Hopkins.

Now nearly six and a half years later — after a long-winding, often indecisive and sometimes traumatic college basketball journey — McLaughlin finds himself entered in the NCAA tournament.

Not with Oregon State, where he committed twice and played a season before transferring.

Of course, not with the Huskies, who have had just one sniff of the tourney over the past decade.

No, the gifted 6-foot-4 playmaker from Gig Harbor, Washington, leads the UC Santa Barbara Gauchos (22-4) into March Madness in Indianapolis and a first-round meeting with Creighton (20-8) on Saturday at 12:30 p.m.

McLaughlin averages a team-leading 16.2 points and 5.2 assists and comes off a Big West tournament championship run in which he was named Most Valuable Player.

He scored 22 in the title game to oust UC-Irvine 79-63, a team that fell in step behind 6-foot-9 junior forward Collin Welp, the son of late Husky center Christian Welp. The younger Welp matched McLaughlin with 22 points of his own on 10-of-19 shooting, with all of his field goals coming inside for the Anteaters (18-9).

If the current Huskies in shambles were given their pick of these two guys, it's hard to say which one they would have snapped up first: The true dish man or the physical post player with deep UW roots?

They badly could have used them both.

Looking at his college resume, McLaughlin might appear to be a kid who can't readily make up his mind. But by all accounts, he's a deep thinker with a sensitive side to him.

Circumstances have not been kind to him.

Following his freshman season at Oregon State in 2016-17, McLaughin was traveling with the Beavers on a summer basketball tour of Spain when he witnessed a terrorist attack. He was eating a pregame meal with his teammates when they looked up to see a van race through a pedestrian mall in Barcelona and kill 14 people and injure another 100 in a grisly incident.

The tragedy deeply affected McLaughlin and left him with post-traumatic stress syndrome. He eventually departed Oregon State, where he had flourished in that lone season, and transferred to Santa Barbara, where he sat out the year.

"There are some challenges that I've been faced with that have impacted me and kept me from being able to compete to the best of my ability in a way that would help my team win games," he told reporters when changing schools. "This was an important decision that I did not take lightly and I apologize to the fans that have been supportive and treated me so well, even through tough times.

"It is my hope that even without specific details you can still try to understand that this was about so much more than basketball."

As he's overcome the nightmarish European experience, the senior guard with those Northwest ties has steadily developed his game, averaging 10.5, 10.3, 13.4 and now 16.2 in his college career. He's upgraded his defensive skills to go with all that offensive ability.

McLaughlin twice faced the Huskies along the way. In Romar's final season in 2016-17, the point guard scored 19 in Oregon State's 87-61 defeat at Alaska Airlines Arena. Two years later, he visited Seattle again and scored 8 and handed out 5 assists for UCSB in a 67-63 defeat to Hopkins' second UW team.

Now he's headed for Indianapolis and the big dance, and thereafter hoping to keep going to the NBA.

With those past connections, McLaughlin is as close as the Huskies get to the postseason.

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