The recruiting edge that helped Darrin Horn win over Henry Clay star Marques Warrick
For Northern Kentucky Coach Darrin Horn, watching Henry Clay star Marques Warrick on a basketball court feels like traveling back in time.
In the best sense of that.
“To me, he’s a little bit of a throwback, little bit of an old-school guy,” Horn says of the NKU signee. “He just plays basketball right. He doesn’t force things. He’s a scorer, but if he has two people on him, he throws it to the open guy.”
In the battle to land Warrick, the city of Lexington’s best high school hoopster in 2019-20, Horn held an obvious trump card.
Last fall, leading up to college basketball’s early signing period in November, Warrick waded through scholarship offers from Eastern Kentucky, Bellarmine, IUPUI, Valparaiso and the New Jersey Institute of Technology, as well as NKU.
The star of Tates Creek High School’s 1991 Boys’ Sweet 16 runner-up team, Horn formed a “Lexington connection” with Warrick.
“Obviously, (Horn is) from Lexington, so that immediately built a relationship and a connection right there,” Warrick says. “Just the relationship he and I had during the process was one of the ultimate factors in picking NKU.”
Had Warrick waited until after his senior season to pick a college, Horn and NKU may have faced substantially heightened competition for his signature.
In his final year in Henry Clay blue and gold, the 6-foot-3, 170-pound guard put together a stellar season, one worthy of Mr. Basketball consideration.
Warrick led Coach Daniel Brown’s Blue Devils (24-6) in scoring (23.2 points a game) and rebounding (4.8), while hitting 53.8 percent of his field-goal tries, 43.4 percent on three-point attempts and 81.8 percent of his foul shots.
Warrick (1,909 career points) also shattered the all-time Henry Clay boys’ hoops scoring record (1,828), long held by Steve Miller, one of the stars of the Blue Devils’ 1983 state title team and Kentucky’s 1984 Mr. Basketball.
“I thought (Warrick) lived up to everything the papers said about him (in the preseason),” Henry Clay’s Brown said. “It wasn’t just the way he played. In our locker room, ‘Ques was a true leader, worked hard. He represents what you want a high school player to be for a top-level program.”
What caught the eye of Warrick’s soon-to-be college coach was how the Henry Clay star performed when the stakes were highest.
In a tight win over Bourbon County in the finals of the Henry Clay Holiday Invitational in December, Warrick poured in 35 points while making 14 of 16 field goal attempts.
When Henry Clay upset 5th Region power John Hardin in Lafayette’s Jock Sutherland Classic early in February, Warrick went for 33.
Even when the Blue Devils found themselves on the wrong side of a 108-104 double-overtime heartbreaker against underdog Frederick Douglass in the 42nd District Tournament semifinals, Warrick stood tall.
In what became the final game of his Henry Clay career, he finished with 48 points.
“The bigger the game and the bigger the moment, the better (Warrick) was,” Horn says. “He played really well when it mattered. I think he has some good stuff to him.”
Northern Kentucky’s boffo success — qualified for three NCAA Tournaments and an NIT — in its first four years of Division I tournament eligibility has been fueled by in-state talent.
Former NKU Coach John Brannen had four products of Kentucky high school basketball among his top seven players when he directed the Norse to their first D-I NCAA tourney in 2017.
Ex-Newport Catholic star Drew McDonald led Northern back to the Big Dance in 2019.
This past season, homegrown products Tyler Sharpe (Bullitt East) and Trevon Faulkner (Kentucky’s 2018 Mr. Basketball from Mercer County) were starters for the initial Horn-coached Northern Kentucky team.
The Norse, of course, won this season’s Horizon League Tournament and would have played in the 2020 NCAA tourney had it not been canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic and the efforts to contain it.
“The players I will be playing with (at Northern), they have a winning mentality,” Warrick says. “They’ve been to the (NCAA) tournament the past few years. I wanted to go to a winning program, and they are a winning program.”
Warrick’s goal as a Northern Kentucky freshman is “to play immediately.” That aspiration may have gotten a boost since NKU standout wing Jalen Tate (13.9 points a game, 5.4 rebounds, 3.6 assists) entered his name in the transfer portal as a graduate transfer.
To fulfill his goal, however, will likely require some vigorous Warrick work with the weights.
“Strength and weight-gaining, that definitely is what is separating me from other players at (the college) level,” Warrick says. “My skills are there; it’s the physical part that needs to improve.”
In our current sheltering-in-place world, Warrick says he is doing what he can to add muscle. “I have hand weights at home and I’ve been doing that and other type exercises to build my strength,” he says.
That old-fashioned hard work could give a “throwback” player an early lift into college basketball.
