Tyler Betsey comes home to Windsor High to announce his commitment to play basketball at Cincinnati
WINDSOR – When Windsor High’s Tyler Betsey came to work out at St. Thomas More prior to transferring, he had opportunities for some low-Division I visits that head coach Jere Quinn implied he probably didn’t need to take. Betsey was disappointed.
“I said no because your journey is going to take you to a much higher spot,” Quinn said.
The bleachers in the Windsor High gym were full on Friday as Betsey, with over a thousand more watching on the 247Sports YouTube livestream, announced his commitment to play high-major college basketball at Cincinnati. He chose Wes Miller and the Bearcats with UConn and Alabama rounding out his final three.
“I just felt the love right away,” Betsey, a four-star recruit, said. “(Cincinnati) just recruited me super hard and then once I stepped foot on that campus it really just felt like home and I really had a feeling, I really knew that’s where I wanted to be.”
Sitting next to his parents and his brother, the 6-foot-8 forward unzipped his hoodie to reveal the Bearcats as his choice after reading a long, emotional list of thank yous he’d written on a folded up piece of loose leaf paper.
It was an opportunity, he said, to really show his mother, Georgina Rush, his father, Robert Betsey, and his community how much he loved them.
“Just being able to show my mom and my dad how much I really love them, that was a big, big part of this,” Betsey said. “I really wanted to show some of the younger underclassmen that they could do it too, I was regular just like them, or even the younger kids that were here – I just wanted to do it where I was from to show people it’s possible from Windsor.”
Betsey could have made the announcement in Oakdale, where he was named the 2022 Gatorade Player of the Year after averaging 21 points, five rebounds and three assists at St. Thomas More, but he decided to do it at Windsor where the journey began.
“It just shows you that this is his home,” longtime Windsor coach Ken Smith, who coached Betsey until he transferred after his sophomore year, told The Courant. “Sometimes when you go to places, you don’t have a home to come back to. But now it shows that this is his home, this is Windsor. He’s always welcome to come back here. We have a lot of guys who don’t get the reputation that he has, but this is his foundation, this is where it started.”
Smith remembered days when he used to take Betsey to and from practice as his mother worked as a nurse. They would have long conversations in the car about basketball, about life.
“You could see he was very skilled,” Smith said. “For me, though, he had been playing the point guard, because he was that good. And so, a lot of the things we talked about, you could see that he loved basketball and he wanted to be the best at it.”
“What people don’t know about Tyler is he’s really a consummate worker,” Quinn said. “He’s in the gym every morning before school, he’s in the gym before he goes to bed and then we have our individual workouts. He’s certainly an elite shooter, but he’s long and he’s a little bit more than that, he’s really a quality kid.
“He’s a very reserved kid so people don’t understand what a competitor he is. And he is fiercely competitive and he’s got a little edge, he wants to prove people he’s really good. He still thinks he’s a little bit under the radar, I said, ‘Ty, you had the national champs recruiting you and you had the No. 1 team in the country recruiting you.'”
In addition to UConn, which seemed to have taken a step back in his recruitment over the summer, and Alabama, Betsey had interest from schools like Creighton, Villanova, Duke and Indiana.
“When I was a sophomore here at Windsor High, (UConn) was where I wanted to go, really where I dreamed of going,” Betsey said. “But really going through the process and realizing what you need and what you want, that’s really what it came down to and that’s where Cincinnati really separated themselves.”
Ranked No. 49 in the Class of 2024 by ESPN and No. 40 by 247Sports, he has “a rare combination of positional size, fluidity, and shooting that makes him a very high-upside prospect,” according to 247Sports’ Adam Finkelstein.
“His shooting is his most glaring attribute with soft touch and natural rhythm to his release. He shows flashes of being able to put the ball on the floor or make plays in transition, but has yet to make that a consistent part of his arsenal yet,” Finkelstein’s scouting report reads.
“Similarly, he has untapped potential on the defensive end, where he has moments where he can get low and wide in his stance to slide his feet. As Betsey continues to mature in the game, he would benefit from showing more sense of urgency at times. Overall though, he’s a naturally talented prospect who has made notable strides in recent years and should still just be scratching the surface of his potential.”
