Xavier Rathan-Mayes Commits to Florida State
Posted by KCarpenter on October 14th, 2012Xavier Rathan-Mayes will be heading to Tallahassee next year, following in the footsteps of his father Tharon Mayes, a standout scorer for the Florida State Seminoles in the late 80’s. Rathan-Mayes is an ultra-skilled 6’3″ combo-guard (though, you should probably read that as “undersized shooting guard”) who is a genuine talent and a serious get (one of ESPN’s top 25 recruits) for Leonard Hamilton. Considering how much Hamilton gets out of his players, the rest of the conference should be concerned about what the sharp-shooting guard can add to Florida State’s attack.
Might Leonard Hamilton Be Looking at a Package Deal?
Of course, there is a juicy subplot to this: Rathan-Mayes plays basketball at Huntington Prep, where he has a younger teammate and friend named Andrew Wiggins. You may know Wiggins as the easy consensus top recruit of the 2014 class (and as a young man mulling reclassification to the 2013 class). Like Rathan-Mayes, Wiggins’ father also played at Florida State, and the families are close. Of course, ESPN has the intriguing quote:
“It’s crazy,” Rathan-Mayes said in an interview last summer. “(Our fathers) playing together and they played on the 76ers together, as well. Me and Wiggins growing up together and playing on the same AAU team, now on the same high school and maybe going to college together — that’s pretty special. We lived about 15 minutes from each other (in Canada), but our dads were always together. We hung out all the time and played ball at the rec center.”
Now, surely Wiggins has lots of other considerations about how he will decide where to play his college ball, but this connection may mean that Florida State is one step closer to pulling off one of the more incredible recruitment victories of the era.
