Makur Maker is going to Howard. Born in Kenya and raised in Australia (as a South Sudanese refugee, from what I can find online), the cousin of Pistons big man Thon Maker moved to California in 2015 to play high school basketball, eventually landing as a top-20 recruit in the Class of 2020. His decision to attend an HBCU is enormous news. Since 2003, as far back as the 247Sports Recruiting Rankings go, only one 4-star player has committed to an HBCU (Charlie White, Jackson State, 2004). Maker is the first 5-star HBCU recruit in men’s basketball in that time period, and possibly ever.
That isn’t to say basketball greats haven’t come out of HBCU’s. Charles Oakley and Ben Wallace both played for Virginia Union University in Division II. Bobby Dandridge attended Norfolk State. There are others. But the recruiting piece of this is new. It, along with prized 2023 recruit Mikey Williams’s advertised interest in HBCU’s (yes, 2023 is a long way off), shows that HBCU’s may currently be more marketable than ever before.
That’s important. Recruiting doesn’t correlate directly with winning, but it does correlate to a significant extent with winning, and winning makes money—as does with having noteworthy on-court/on-field products, like Makur Maker or Mikey Williams. Money, in turn, can advance educational interests, which one would assume would at least somewhat help in the struggle for socioeconomic equality between races in America. At Howard, which is ranked fourth among national universities in the U.S. News & World Report Social Mobility rankings (the metric evaluates the graduation rates of Pell Grant recipients in the context of each school’s overall graduation rate), it’s not hard to connect the dots and see how a better basketball team could lead to more equitable economic outcomes. No, it’s not another Civil Rights Act. But it’s also not nothing.
So, credit to Howard coach Kenny Blakeney for landing Maker. Credit to Maker for making the choice to attend an HBCU instead of a school with the resources of, say, Kentucky. Howard’s got a long way to go on the court: The signing places the Bison among the MEAC favorites, but it’s been six years since the MEAC champion last wound up better than a 16-seed in the NCAA Tournament, and eight years since the MEAC champion won an NCAA Tournament game (excluding play-in games). Still, this is the most noteworthy news surrounding an HBCU men’s basketball program since that Norfolk State upset of Mizzou in 2012, and the most promising news for HBCU sports at large in a long, long time.
