Inside The Huskies

Ex-Husky Wesley Yates III Returns to Alaska Airlines Arena with USC

The young Texan sat out the entire UW season last year with a foot injury.

Dan Raley

Ex-Husky Wesley Yates III (6) returns to Alaska Airlines Arena on Saturday with USC.
Ex-Husky Wesley Yates III (6) returns to Alaska Airlines Arena on Saturday with USC. / USC

Wesley Yates III, according to last year's stat sheet, was the University of Washington basketball player who never was.

The high-scoring guard from Beaumont, Texas, was a touted freshman for the Huskies who broke his foot before the 2023-24 season began and tried to come back at midseason, only to re-injure himself once more.

Yates never appeared in a UW game, left to sit on the bench in street clothes throughout the season and remain a reluctant spectator for Mike Hopkins' team.

On Saturday afternoon, Husky fans will finally get to see what they missed with this guy when the 6-foot-4 redshirt freshman returns to Alaska Airlines Arena with the USC Trojans (5-4 overall, 0-1 Big Ten) to face his old team (6-2, 0-1).

New UW coach Danny Sprinkle shared how he did his best to try and keep Yates in Montlake, yet in the end the backcourt player followed former Husky assistant coaches Will Conroy and Quincy Pondexter, both one-time NBA and highly decorated UW players, to USC.

"We actually had quite a few meetings and he was phenomenal," Sprinkle said of the young Texan. "He was dead set on staying. We met multiple times. I don't know what happened at the end."

Coming out of Beaumont United High School, Yates was a 19.7-point scorer for a 36-2 team who had 26 scholarship offers, including Alabama, Gonzaga, Houston, LSU and Texas. He was drawn to the Huskies by the prospect of playing for Pondexter, his cousin.

Once Hopkins was let go and before Sprinkle was brought in, Yates posted on social media his desire for the Huskies to hire former Conroy as the new head coach.

For the Trojans, Yates has come off the bench in all nine games and averages 7.1 points per outing while shooting 42.4 percent from the field.

He turned in double-figure performances in four of his first five outings, with a season high of 14 points against UT Arlington and San Jose State, but he's scored just 4 points in the past four games.

"i had great talks with him," Sprinkle said. "Great kid. Obviously a tremendous scorer."

Yates will finally get his chance to try Alaska Airlines Arena on for size on game day and see how it fits him.

For the latest UW football and basketball news, go to si.com/college/washington

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Dan Raley
DAN RALEY

Dan Raley has worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, as well as for MSN.com and Boeing, the latter as a global aerospace writer. His sportswriting career spans four decades and he's covered University of Washington football and basketball during much of that time. In a working capacity, he's been to the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the MLB playoffs, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship and countless Final Fours and bowl games.

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