UW men’s basketball adding front court help with transfer of Lathan Sommerville from Rutgers
By Charles Hamaker
Seattle, WA - With a new season now in college basketball (And college athletics generally, of course), there is going to be some significant turnover for your roster unless you’ve got the resources and the buy in to keep guys together. That rings true for the Washington Husky men’s basketball team as they reportedly have seven players in the transfer portal on top of five players already at graduating age or near it. The first player to come in and help the Husky squad fill out their roster for the 2025-26 season will be a player that had an impressive freshman campaign last year with the Rutgers Scarlet Knights in Lathan Sommerville. Sommerville reportedly committed to the Huskies back on April 1st, having chosen Washington over Butler and Villanova. Sommerville is an exciting addition to the roster, and given it’s current state of just a handful of players any addition could be exciting, that should only grow more and more over the next few years if he decides to stay with the Huskies given how he looked in his first season of collegiate play.
“We are extremely excited to have Lathan join our program. Lathan will bring a combination of size, skill and physicality that is needed in Big Ten play. His versatility, combined with character, will make him a great addition to Husky basketball and our campus community.”
Learn about Lathan
Sommerville is a former four star, top-100 recruit out of Peoria, Illinois. Standing at 6-foot-10, 275-pounds, Lathan should give Washington some help inside especially considering how it times that was a big issue for the Huskies against the tough nature of the Big Ten. Given the injuries to the front court and how the players that were healthy there got run through at times by bigger teams in the conference, Sommerville should provide a boost for the purple and gold even if they weren’t losing a large chunk of their roster to the portal. In his first and only year at Rutgers last season, Sommerville played in all 32 games while making 15 straight starts in the second half of the season before returning to the bench the last two games to close out the year. Lathan averaged 8.2 points and 4.1 rebounds while shooting 50.6% from the field and 86.3% on free throws throughout the year, posting a personal-best 17 points against Michigan and tallied a career-high nine rebounds three times.
Those numbers show a solid first campaign in collegiate play, and while it clearly isn’t always something that transfers over, his high school numbers suggest he could be a massive presence in the paint for Washington. Just a year ago in high school, Sommerville was a four-star recruit at Richwoods High in Peoria, ranking 87th nationally by ESPN that averaged 26.3 points, 14.4 rebounds, 4.2 blocks and 4.1 assists as a senior. A highly touted player out of high school and a promising player at Rutgers in his freshman year led him to getting strong marks once he hit the portal, ranked as a four-star transfer and the No. 12 center in the transfer portal by On3.
Current roster, from what we know
On the roster for next season (5):
Guards: Vazoumana Diallo
Forward: Niko Bundalo
Center: Franck Kepnang, Lathan Sommerville, and Mady Traore
In the transfer portal (7):
Guards: Tyler Harris, Jase Butler and Mekhi Mason.
Forwards: Christian King, Dominique Diomande, and Wilhelm Breidenbach.
Center: KC Ibekwe.
What’s next?
For the Washington Husky men’s basketball team, head coach Danny Sprinkle and the rest of the staff is still looking to fill out their roster for the 2025-26 season considering their own players that are currently in the transfer portal and the losses that they had from graduating players. The rest of Washington’s 2025-26 schedule hasn’t been revealed yet, but they do now know that they’ll have this four-team tournament to partake in during late November with the Acrisure Invitational announcement recently. While the Husky men’s basketball team largely had a disappointing season in Danny Sprinkle’s first year at the helm, there is no time for them to sit and feel bad about themselves while the rest of the NCAA and Big Ten conference will be working to improve upon what they did last year while Washington needs to do a lot of work already to improve upon the poor first season in t he new conference that they had. It’ll be fascinating to see what the Huskies can do in the portal to add to their group ahead of tipoff this winter.
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Check out our previous CSS Huskies articles here.
Check out our previous Washington Husky men’s basketball articles here.
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Cover photo by Cos Lymperopoulos/Rutgers athletics
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