Mikey Williams is on the move again.
The social media sensation from San Diego has committed to play basketball at Sacramento State, his third college in as many seasons.
The 6-foot-3 guard initially committed to Memphis out of San Ysidro High School but never joined the team before transferring to Central Florida, where injuries at the beginning and end of last season limited him to 18 games, five starts and a 5.1 points-per-game scoring average.
Now he’s heading back west to a university trying to breathe life into a moribund basketball program with splashy hires and a pot of NIL money. The head coach is former NBA player Mike Bibby, who spent seven seasons with the Sacramento Kings and won an NCAA title with Arizona in 1997. The volunteer general manager is Shaquille O’Neal, whose son, Shaqir, is transferring to Sac State from Florida A&M for his final college season.
Also new on the roster via the transfer portal is Jeremiah “Bear” Cherry, a 6-11, 280-pound center from San Diego who averaged 9.9 points and 5.3 rebounds for UNLV last season.
Williams has yet to live up to the social media hype from a prolific high school career that began with a 46-point game in his freshman debut with San Ysidro High (and included a 77-point game three weeks later).
The following season, he moved east to Lake Norman Christian in North Carolina. Next came Vertical Academy in Charlotte, then a return to San Ysidro High School for his senior year while living in a 3,700-square-foot home he purchased in Jamul. (The five-acre property with a tennis court and pool is currently for sale with an asking price of $1.297 million.)
Things went south shortly after his senior season, when Williams was arrested for allegedly firing a gun at an occupied vehicle during a late-night incident on his property. He faced nine felony counts and multiple years in prison after a judge ruled in October 2023 that there was substantial evidence for the case to proceed to trial.
A month later, Williams reached a plea agreement where he pleaded guilty to two felonies — one for making criminal threats, one for personal use of a firearm in commission of a crime — that would be reduced to a single misdemeanor the following August if he did not commit any other criminal offenses and completed a series of classes, including one for anger management.
Williams had hoped to join the Memphis team at midseason once the plea agreement was struck. But, in the words of attorney Randy Grossman, “the can was getting kicked down the road repeatedly” by university administrators, and Williams transferred at the semester break to Central Florida.
“All I needed was a chance,” he said in a post to his 3.6 million Instagram followers.
A foot injury delayed his first college game until Dec. 21, when he played three minutes and scored no points in a blowout win against Jacksonville. He played more as the season went on and started five straight games in February and early March, averaging 7.8 points in 23.2 minutes per game before suffering a knee injury. His season high was 14 points.
Next stop: Sacramento State, which went 7-25 in 2024-25, finished last in the Big Sky Conference at 3-15, has only two winning records in 34 seasons of Division I basketball and has never been to the NCAA Tournament.
But 43-year-old university president Luke Wood, a Sac State alum, is bent on changing that. He has upgraded the basketball facility and announced plans to build a new stadium with the goal of taking the Hornets football program from FCS to the full scholarship FBS level. That coincides with the “Sac12” fundraising campaign to one day join the reformed Pac-12 Conference.
“It’s all about elevation,” Wood recently told CapRadio in Sacramento. “If you want to be in the big time, you’ve got to basically act like it. We’re bringing in the best coaches. We’re bringing in the best players. And it’s time for us to fix two programs that did not do well last year. Football did not do well. Men’s basketball did not do well. …
“It’s time for us to make sure that we are expanding what we’re doing in those two very big revenue-generating sports, so I want to also explain the connection here. We’re investing in athletics as an investment in Sacramento State.”
UCSD adds transfer, preps
New Tritons coach Clint Allard got his first addition from the transfer portal, landing a commitment from Buffalo guard Tyson Dunn. The 6-3 senior averaged 12.4 points, 3.8 rebounds, 5.3 assists and 1.5 steals last season for a 9-22 Bulls team that finished 11th in the MAC. Dunn started all 31 games in his only season at Buffalo after three years at the University of Western Ontario in Canada.
Allard also received a high school commitment from Jaden Vance, a 6-6 shooting guard from AZ Compass Prep in Phoenix. Vance joins Hudson Mayes, a 6-1 guard from Redondo Union High School who committed two weeks ago.
Originally Published:
This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content.
