The Washington Post's Eric Prisbell talks Howard Athletics with Coach Kevin Nickelberry and Athletic Director Louis Perkins

Clark Francis, (Hoop Scoop) recruiting analyst labeled the recruiting class that Howard men’s basketball coach Kevin Nickelberry signed as a top 40 class.

Long-suffering Howard basketball pulls in heralded recruiting haul

Washington, D.C. -- Howard men’s basketball coach Kevin Nickelberry was never confident about securing a commitment from Prince Okoroh, the Eleanor Roosevelt forward who Nickelberry felt was good enough to play in the Atlantic 10 Conference and smart enough to thrive in the Ivy League.

As a Gates Millennium Scholar, Okoroh had his choice of schools. Would Okoroh want to suit up for a team that had won just six games this past season? Would he commit to a program whose basketball court was sprinkled with dead spots and whose poorly ventilated locker room was no bigger than a large storage closet?

The answer was yes. And when Okoroh called Nickelberry with the news in mid-April, a few days before he was named MVP of the preliminary game of the Capital Classic, the coach was “astonished,” Okoroh recalled. “He almost didn’t believe me at first. When I told him I was coming, it was almost like he fainted.”

This area’s already competitive college basketball recruiting landscape became more competitive in recent weeks with coaching hires at Maryland, George Washington and George Mason. But an under-the-radar development has been the recruiting by success-starved Howard, which assembled an attention-grabbing class punctuated by Okoroh’s signing.

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