UNC Basketball: Four-star forward turns down Tar Heels

Another miss for the UNC Basketball program in the 2021 recruiting class as a four-star forward turns them down for Purdue

The UNC Basketball program finally found out their fate for a four-star recruiting target in the 2021 recruiting class. And it wasn’t good news.

On Friday night, Trey Kaufman officially announced his college decision with a live stream on YouTube to decide between North Carolina, Purdue, Indiana, Indiana State and Virginia. In the end, Kaufman elected to stay in-state but not to the Hoosiers. Instead, he’s heading to West Lafayette to the Purdue Boilermakers.

The Top 40 prospect is a big get for the Boilermakers and was named the Gatorade Player of the Year for the state of Indiana. He was a prospect that was on several Indiana programs radar but gathered some interest from a pair of Atlantic Coast Conference programs in UNC and Virginia.

Kaufman even took a visit to both UNC and Virginia over the Summer to take in the campus and see if it was a fit. In the end, it wasn’t as the Tar Heels faded in the recruitment and the factor of staying in-state and close to home came into play.

The Tar Heels currently have just two commitments in their 2021 class and would have loved to add a wing like Kaufman to that class. Now the focus shifts on the remaining targets on their board in Hunter Sallis, Patrick Baldwin and Chet Holmgren, all five-star recruits.

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