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Inside The Huskies

UW Has Chance With Recruit Because He's a Seahawks Fan

Osani Gayles at IMG Academy is down to five choices, the Huskies among them.
Dan Raley|
IMG Academy's Osani Gayles (13) gets brought down during a 2025 game in Jacksonville, Florida.
IMG Academy's Osani Gayles (13) gets brought down during a 2025 game in Jacksonville, Florida. | Corey Perrine/Florida Times-Union / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

Osani Gayles is a wide receiver from the IMG Academy in Florida, by way of California, who this week has pared his college football choices to Alabama, Notre Dame, Stanford, Tennessee and Washington.

That's a lot of blue bloods competing for his services, plus Stanford, some 80 miles from his parents' home in Stockton, would have a geographical edge.

So what could give the Huskies a chance to bring this 4-star pass-catcher to Seattle?

"We grew up big Seahawks fans and I remember watching that team with Marshawn and the Legion of Boom," Gayles, whose father Eddie and mother Angela originally are from Seattle, told Whoa Sports. "I think I was around 6. Then I started playing football and I was hooked."

As Jedd Fisch reminds his players, Be a Pro. That's why he took them to the Seahawks' VMAC facility for a recent spring practice.

The Husky coach is going to milk that connection with the local NFL franchise and its resulting Super Bowl success as much as he can to build his program.

In Gayles, the Huskies are pursuing a 5-foot-11, 185-pound receiver who has elite 10.76-second speed over 100 meters.

No matter which recruiting service you subscribe to, he's a top 100 pick.

The UW previously signed receiver Raiden Vines-Bright from IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, and originally from Arizona, made him a starter last season and then lost him in the transfer portal to his hometown Arizona State.

For the recently completed spring practice, Fisch's coaching staff welcomed cornerback Ksani Jiles from IMG and the originally the Los Angeles area to the Huskies and he seemed to do well.

Osani Gayles is shown in 2023 while playing for Stockton's St. Mary's High School.
Osani Gayles is shown in 2023 while playing for Stockton's St. Mary's High School. | CLIFFORD OTO/THE STOCKTON RECORD / USA TODAY NETWORK

Gayes comes off his junior season at IMG with 20 catches for 492 yards and 5 touchdowns over nine games in what typically is a rush-heavy offense. For that matter, he also ran the ball five times for 70 yards and a score.

He played as a freshman and a sophomore for St. Mary's High School in Stockton, coming up with 43 catches for 756 yards and 6 scores in 2024 while rushing 22 times for 218 yards and 3 TDs.

He also had two interceptions and returned a kickoff for a touchdown in his final season at home.

Gayles counts his biggest football thrill as playing at St. Mary's as a ninth-grader alongside his older brother Omari, who's now a junior defensive back for Harvard.

Meantime, the Huskies will try to add to his memories by getting him back to Seattle with the promise of maybe practicing where the Seahawks play.

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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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