Inside The Huskies

Former WSU Guard Has 5 Solid Portal Choices, Including UW

Cedric Coward is looking for someplace to play after a shoulder injury wiped his season with the Cougars.
Dan Raley|
Washington State guard Cedric Coward hangs onto the ball under pressure from Eastern Washington's Andrew Cook.
Washington State guard Cedric Coward hangs onto the ball under pressure from Eastern Washington's Andrew Cook. | James Snook-Imagn Images

Cedric Coward played just six games for the Washington State basketball before he suffered a rotator cuff injury and was lost for the season. However, the 6-foot-6 guard hasn't been forgotten by any means.

In the transfer portal, the 6-foot-6 senior guard revealed on Tuesday he has five options, according to On3, and all fairly high-profile destinations to choose from -- Alabama, Duke, Florida, Kansas and Washington.

Should he pick the Huskies, he would go for a state of Washington trifecta, playing for three of the four biggest college teams inside the borders in Eastern Washington, WSU and the UW.

Coward, from Fresno, California, was one of college basketball's hard-luck stories this past season after leading the Cougars in scoring early on with 17.7 points per game and averaging 7 rebounds and 3.7 assists per outing, and then tearing up his shoulder in a 74-69 victory over Boise State in early December.

With a medical redshirt and a year left to play, WSU followers were hoping he might return to the Cougars.

Yet even while playing two years for coach David Riley at Eastern Washington and following him to Pullman, Coward knew all along he was going to seek a higher profile situation to see if he can make himself into an NBA player.

“There’s a part of me that wants to come back, but most of me wants to go to my goal. That’s making the NBA,” Coward told the Spokane Spokesman-Review. “I think it’s really a situation for me where I don’t expect to come back. And I think a lot of people, although they have that expectation because I am medically redshirted, should see it from a point of view of whatever is best for the individual is what’s best for them. If I get drafted, I get drafted. If I don’t, I don’t, and we’ll see what happens.”

Coward was a first-team All-Big Sky selection following the 2023-24 season in which he averaged 15.4 points and 6.7 rebounds an outing.

To get 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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