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Gauchos get quick draw from a young gun

By MARK PATTON NEWS-PRESS SENIOR WRITER

June 23, 2009 7:47 AM

Hoop Scoop was the first recruiting service to notice Kyle Boswell's seamless transition from diapers to basketball trunks.

He was so young when he got his first mention, you had to wonder what kind of dribbling they were talking about.

Hoop Scoop didn't hesitate to rank the prodigy from Huntington Beach among the top recruits from the high school graduating class of 2010.

They released the rating in 2005, when Boswell was a 5-foot-4 eighth grader.

And so four years and 10 inches later, with one season still to go at Edison High School, the 3-point-shooting whiz kid figured that it was soon enough to pick a college.

Boswell, now 6-2 and 180 pounds, announced last week that he'll be enrolling at UCSB in September of 2010.

"A lot more guys are committing at a younger age," he said. "You develop a relationship with a school and its coaches and players. They start building a program around you, and you understand that you're the player they really want.

"It's a lot better than waiting until the last minute and scrambling around to see what kind of offers you get."

If you ask UCSB's coaches - and the NCAA won't let them answer you until they get Boswell's national letter of intent in five months - his commitment didn't come a moment too soon.

They offered him the scholarship almost a year ago.

It took Boswell a little by surprise, considering the first impression he thought he'd made at an AAU tournament in Las Vegas during the spring of 2008.

He clearly remembers seeing Gaucho assistant coach Jono Metzger-Jones there.

"He had on this shirt with a huge UCSB on it," Boswell recalled. "He was one of the few coaches in the stands that game, and I recognized him right away."

He wishes he could forget the game, a good part of which he also watched from the sidelines.

"I didn't have a very good game," he said. "I didn't knock down a whole lot of shots. It was pretty frustrating, because I wasn't able to get the other players to move the ball around very much. Nobody wanted to give it up.

"It was the only tournament I played with that team."

After the game, Doug Boswell wrapped an arm around his son and said, "Well, I guess you shouldn't be looking to go to UCSB now."

Guess again, Pop.

Metzger-Jones saw what he'd been looking for: A shooter who would fearlessly throw himself into screens and rebounds and loose balls. The fact that he didn't make many shots that day was irrelevant.

He'd made enough earlier that year as a sophomore, including 69 from the 3-point line, to average a school-record 22.6 points per game.

Boswell switched to an Orange County AAU team, "One Tough School," for the next tournament, and Metzger-Jones followed him.

"He came to every one of my games that summer," he said. "During the first tournament, he talked to coach (Bob) Williams and let him know that he really liked me, and that he wanted him to come watch me play."

Boswell won Williams over after just a few games.

"He told me that he was looking for a shooter who could complement the other players they had," he said, "and he said that I was that guy."

Boswell had never seen UCSB play until he tuned it its 72-59 loss on ESPN earlier that year to Utah State and its sharp-shooting All-American, Jaycee Carroll.

But it was the Aggies he wanted to see, not the Gauchos.

"Utah State was the first school to offer me a scholarship," he said. "Their coaches were saying that they saw some things similar in me to Jaycee Carroll."

Boswell even visited the school. But Carroll's heir apparent soon got a Jaycee-you-later from the Aggies:

"They called and said that one of their guys had decided to go on a Mormon mission, and so his scholarship wouldn't be available (in 2010)," Boswell said. "It hurt that it wouldn't be there for me - but as it turned out, it was all for the best.

"Santa Barbara is definitely a great fit for me."

He took him nearly a year and four visits - official and otherwise - to decide for sure.

"I played a pickup game with five-or-six of the guys," Boswell said. "I was on Chris Devine's team - oh man, that guy was something else. He could post up, shoot a jump hook over you, take you outside or to the hole.

"It was good fun playing with him."

He had even more fun watching Devine and Co. tangle with top-ranked North Carolina last autumn.

"That was unbelievable, the way the student section was rocking that night," Boswell said. "I've never felt that much energy at a basketball game before.

"I realize it's not like that all the time, but it showed me how loud it can get there."

It wasn't the only reason he chose UCSB. He's an honors student with a 4.3 grade-point average, with thoughts of majoring in either biology or engineering.

Boswell got offers from Princeton, as well as USF, UC Irvine, USF and the University of San Diego.

And his recruiting could have blown up in the Gauchos' face this summer. A bad muscle strain in his back kept him out of two-thirds of Edison's season - and off the recruiters' radar - although he still averaged 21 points per game.

"Watching your team, knowing you could be out there helping them in some of those close games, pretty much killed me," he said.

Boswell has some scores to settle next year.

But he's also now part of another team, a quirk of college basketball's early signing period.

"They've got a lot of really good guys there," he said. "When I committed last week, I drove up there, and hung around with Jaime Serna and Orlando Johnson and James Powell and some of the others.

"I really love those guys. They're not just good basketball players, they're good citizens, too, and they seem like the kind of teammates I want to be around for four years."

A lot can happen in that time, and UCSB thinks it'll be mostly good.

Hoop Scoop, after all, wasn't wrong about the last four years.

Mark Patton's column appears on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. E-mail: mpatton@newspress.com