Let’s give a warm William and Mary Welcome to Julian Lewis, a 6-foot-6 shooting guard from Ann Arbor, Mich., a rising senior at Ann Arbor Huron High School, and one of the best high school basketball players in his home state.
Lewis is the second player committed to the 2021 Tribe recruiting class, after Tyler Rice announced his commitment to play for William and Mary earlier in June. And Brendan and I are excited to welcome Lewis into the William and Mary community.
Lewis announced his decision to play for us Sunday, Aug. 9, on Twitter, having received an offer from head coach Dane Fischer in late March.
Lewis, a star player for Huron last season, finished the season averaging 12 points, seven rebounds and three assists per game, while helping lead the River Rats to a near-perfect, 21-1 record. Thanks in great part to Lewis’s efforts, Huron reached the district championship against Ypsilanti Lincoln (19-3), where they looked poised to win.
Sadly, that game was halted and then canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic before Lewis and his team could try to capture the district title Friday, March 13. Still, for his efforts leading the River Rats last season, Lewis was named to the Ann Arbor Dream Team and was All-State Conference Red and honorable mention all-state.
During his recruitment, Lewis received more than a dozen D-I offers, including Ohio, Central Michigan, Eastern Michigan, West Michigan, Toledo, Miami of Ohio, Duquesne, Denver, Brown, Princeton, Rice and Elon.
As with Rice, who also passed on an offer from Phoenix head coach Mike Schrage, we’re glad Lewis chose the Tribe over Elon. The Phoenix may have won a battle with their CAA quarterfinals win, but William and Mary is winning the recruiting war!
For Lewis, the five-month journey to William and Mary began once he started speaking to Fischer and assistant coach Jason Kemp over the phone. What drew him in was the College’s strong reputation for academics and the coaches’ emphasis on character and integrity, both of which appealed to Lewis as a person.
“It was mostly a process for me,” Lewis said in a video interview over Zoom. “I got to know the coaches. I got to know what the school’s about, and it was a very helpful process and the coaches helped me get through it. During this process, the coaches really explained what they were about as a team and what they expect out of me and why they were recruiting me.”
“They said they recruit great guys because they don’t like to deal with people who don’t like to get good grades and who don’t like to go class,” he continued. “And that’s another aspect of why I felt William and Mary was good for me, is the academics piece, because you guys are really great academically. I feel like that could set me up for the future once the ball stops bouncing because you always have to have a backup plan.”
In addition, during his recruitment process, Lewis spoke with Rice, who had already committed to William and Mary and who knew more about the College, having visited in the spring before the COVID-19 pandemic closed campus. For Lewis, who visited the College later in the spring when campus was closed on a family road trip, the opportunity to speak to Rice shined a light on the William and Mary community.
“He’s a great guy,” Lewis said of Rice. “I asked him a couple questions, like, what was campus life like, because I went there when nobody else was there, so I really couldn’t tell what it was like. So I asked him what campus life was like and he said it was really great. Everybody knows you, everybody’s happy. And he said he didn’t really see anything that made him nervous or anything. He said everything made him really comfortable. And I asked him, like, about diversity and stuff, and he said it’s a really diverse school. He said it’s a really great place to be around.”
While he was still considering William and Mary, Lewis also spoke with Fischer frequently over the phone. (“Coach Fischer would always be calling me.”) And he found that Fischer’s positive attitude, openness and honesty made him want to play for the College as well.
“Coach Fischer’s a great guy,” Lewis said. “He really tells the truth when recruiting. He doesn’t hold anything back. Like, if you ask a question, a really serious question, he’ll answer it truthfully, which is a great thing to go into, a great thing to know.”
The team, as Lewis saw it, seemed ready for many great seasons in the near future and had played great together in the not-so-distant past.
“And the team, I like the style of play they had,” Lewis said. “They looked they were playing really good last year. I was watching some film. And they all looked like they had a great bond together, because you know some teams are broken apart and not really healthy. But this was a great healthy situation, so that’s why I took it.”
In the end, what drew Lewis to the College was the extent to which the coaches wanted him at William and Mary and the length at which they expressed that desire.
“I just felt like I was wanted more by William and Mary,” Lewis said. “They really put that out there that they really wanted me and that they felt like I could fit in with their program. Props to the coaching staff for doing good recruiting. The other schools were great — great, great schools, cause going down the road, those were schools I was also considering. But I just felt most comfortable at the end of the day with William and Mary because of the style of play, the academics piece. I take pride in my academics, so I felt like that was a good place to go.”
For Lewis, the decision capped off what could be at times a stressful recruitment process. Lewis’s two older brothers — Michael, the oldest, and Avery, the middle — both played college basketball at Wayne State in Detroit, Lewis explained, so they helped him keep a cool head during recruitment when temperatures began to reach a boiling point.
“My brothers both had a great recruiting process when they were growing up,” Lewis said.
“I kinda learned from them what to look for and what to want in a team. They just helped me throughout this process. When I was stressed, they’d help me calm and talk to me about what I’m thinking. But I mean, they were great in this process, and I felt like they made my decisions easier, as well as my parents, too, because they were also a big impact on this process.”
The two brothers inspired Lewis to succeed, follow in their footsteps and even outshine them both in academics and athletics.
“I’ve always strived to try to be better than both of them, so they’ve always influenced me to get better on the court and get better off the court for academics,” Lewis added.
Lewis’s parents also played a major role during recruitment. They took him on that long road trip to William and Mary earlier in the spring, also taking the opportunity to visit Duquesne and Illinois at Chicago, two of Lewis’s other possible interests.
“This is my biggest support group, is my parents,” Lewis said. “And you know, they’ve been taking me on ‘visits.’ We’re not really allowed to talk to coaches and stuff, so they’ve just been driving me everywhere and I’m really thankful for them, because not many people have that. So I really take that personally.”
With his commitment to the College, Lewis said he’s confident he, Rice, and his teammates can lead our Tribe to its first NCAA Tournament appearance in history. He’s ready to get us over the CAA hump and end the much-mentioned curse — and so are we after decades of suffering.
“Yeah, I feel like we can,” Lewis said. “I feel like we have a great group of guys who are really bought in to getting better and to be one of the best teams in the CAA. And I think how we’re gonna do that is just getting to know each other first, but also counting on each other and being able to rely on each other, having that connection on the court that helps you play better, cause that’s what my high school team had. We had a really great connection. Sophomore year wasn’t really as great a connection, cause it was our first year together. But I feel like if we get to know each other early, we can do really big things, cause we’re a really good class and I feel like we can do big things there.”
In addition to helping us reach March Madness for the first time, Lewis said he hopes to be a leader on campus, one who will make a positive difference in the wake of Black Lives Matter, George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis and Jacob Blake’s near-fatal shooting in Kenosha, Wis.
His arrival at William and Mary will coincide with an increasingly momentous time in our College’s history, one that now includes the recently announced Memorial to African Americans Enslaved by William & Mary.
“I’m looking for a culture that’s very happy, very supportive of each other, and that they don’t see race, they just see people, not race,” Lewis said of his hopes for William and Mary. “Because I feel like whatever race you are, it doesn’t matter what color you are or anything. It just matters what you’re about personally, and I feel like people shouldn’t be judging people on what they look like. And I also feel like I want a good community where everybody’s happy together, no matter what race they are, everybody’s happy together.”
Alongside Huron head coach Waleed Samaha, his father and Huron assistant coach Mike Lewis, and others from the Huron boys basketball program, Lewis marched peacefully through Detroit this summer in support of Black Lives Matter. And now, like Rice, Lewis is looking to bring his powerful sense of leadership and responsibility to William and Mary, both on and off the court at Kaplan Arena.
“Going there, I feel like it’d be great thing just to get my degree and graduate and get a good job,” Lewis said. “Because I feel like once you go there and you say you’ve done that, you’re proving that African American people are just as equal as anybody else in the world and that we’re just the same as anybody else in the world.”
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Welcome to the Tribe, Julian! Congratulations on your decision — very well-made! We’re very excited to see you play two seasons from now, and so are Rice and your future teammates. See you soon.