Longar Signs With Mens Basketball Team

Highly-touted center will be a freshman next year at OU

NORMAN, Okla. Less than a week after signing one of the country's top junior college big men, OU men's basketball coach Kelvin Sampson announced the reception of a national letter of intent today from Longar Longar, a highly regarded center who plays for Laurinburg (N.C.) Institute, the nation's No. 1-ranked prep school team.

Longar, 6-11 and 210 pounds, is a native of Sudan and moved to the United States as a high schooler. He attended John Marshall High School in Rochester, Minn., and signed with the Sooners last November. Longar was a consensus top-75 recruit as a senior last year and led his 24-4 John Marshall squad to the Elite Eight of the state tournament, the school's best-ever finish. He averaged 18.0 points, 10.4 rebounds and 4.7 blocks en route to earning first-team All-State honors.

"I'm not sure you can ever have enough quality post players," said Sampson. "The thing I love about Longar is that he has an unbelievably high ceiling. His potential is tremendous and one of the things that excites us it that his offensive skills are improving by the day. With post guys like Taj Gray (OU's signee last week), Kevin Bookout, Johnnie Gilbert and Larry Turner already in the fold, Longar gives us a great young big man to develop and that's something we're excited about."

Said Laurinburg Institute head coach Chris Chaney, "First of all, Longar is an unreal person. He's considerate, he's very hard-working, he's never late. He's basically what you call a dream kid.' You just can't get much better as a person than Longar is and I'd say he's a typical OU player in that regard.

"On the court," continued Chaney, "he's very athletic for his size. He runs the floor well and does things both inside and out. We're working on making him stronger and we're looking for him to have a great year for us. He's our starting center and through six games he's averaging about 12 points, 10 rebounds and five blocked shots. Those might not sound like great numbers, but we've got about 12 or 13 Division-I players on our team."

Oklahoma has one more scholarship available for the 2004-05 academic year.

University of Oklahoma Athletics

Longar Signs With Mens Basketball Team

Related News

Related Videos

Sponsors