Michigan Wolverines

FORT WAYNE, Ind. -- He is a player without a true position, a guy who is planning on using the summer to smooth out and figure out his game.

Jae’Sean Tate (Pickerington, Ohio/Pickerington Central) has a ton of talent, is an explosive scorer and has a great knack for rebounding and jumping at the right time. He is, however, in a bit of a predicament right now.

Tate is the classic tweener. At 6-foot-4, the No. 54 player in the Class of 2014 ESPN Super 60 has good size for a guard but is undersized as a forward. That problem has led to both his high school and summer basketball coaches working with Tate on his guard skills over the summer.

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FORT WAYNE, Ind. -- He was almost forgotten heading into last spring, another player on a summer basketball team pushed down the bench in an environment where starters play a lot of minutes and every possession is a chance to be noticed.

Slowly, though, Amanze Egekeze (Lake in the Hills, Ill./Huntley) started to find himself even though he was the third man off the bench for the Illinois Wolves when he started playing summer basketball with the team last season. The aggressiveness Egekeze needed at the time was there, but the skills he had to have were still raw.

So he worked and he soon realized if he pushed enough, he could play basketball in college.

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Derrick Walton Jr. found out through a vibration from his phone. Sitting in class at Chandler Park Academy on Thursday afternoon, he quickly checked the message, clicked the link and found out the work he put in over the past two seasons had panned out.

He was the No. 39 player in the country in the initial 2013 ESPN 100 and the No. 9 point guard in the nation, rocketing up 11 slots in the point guard rankings and entering the national conversation for the first time.

“A couple of my teammates were in class and they were wondering what I was looking at,” Walton Jr. said Thursday afternoon. “When I told them, they were happy for me.”

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Michigan coach John Beilein won’t hand out offers for the Class of 2014 until June 15, but some of the players he and his staff are looking at are starting to be recognized.

Four Michigan potential targets made the 2014 ESPN Super 60, led by guard Devin Booker (Moss Point, Miss./Moss Point), rated as the No. 24 player in the nation.

The son of former professional basketball player Melvin Booker is someone the Wolverines have paid a lot of attention to in this class. But he’s not the only one.

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