Despite losing their best three-point shooter from last year’s Final Four team in Ben Brust, the Wisconsin Badgers won’t lack for depth on the perimeter in 2014-15. Starters Josh Gasser and Traevon Jackson are back in Madison, as is sophomore Bronson Koenig, and both Zak Showalter and Riley Dearring will be available after redshirting a season ago.
With the amount of production back on campus for Bo Ryan, earning minutes would prove to be difficult for guards without the amount of experience that Gasser, Jackson and Koenig possess. With that in mind two guards, sophomore Jordan Hill and freshman walk-on T.J. Schlundt, have decided to redshirt as announced by the program Wednesday evening.
Hill played a total of 25 minutes in 11 games as a freshman, but as noted above it would have been difficult to crack through Wisconsin’s perimeter rotation given the players also vying for minutes. The decisions of Hill and Schlundt give them a year to mature physically, with an eye towards stepping forward to earn playing time in 2015-16.
“I feel like the best decision for my future is to gain this extra year,” Hill said in the release. “As a competitor, it’s hard for me to come to this decision, but I think it’s the mature move. The best thing I can do now is to go at my teammates as hard as possible in practice and use this year to get better in every phase of the game.”