Noah Shelby, a guard with two years of eligibility remaining who previously played at Vanderbilt and Rice, announced Sunday afternoon that he will join the Kansas men’s basketball team next season.
“I look forward to joining the @KUHoops family,” he wrote in a post on X. “Redshirting this upcoming season and will have two years of eligibility remaining. All glory to God!!”
The forthcoming redshirt year will give Shelby, a consensus four-star recruit and top-100 recruit out of high school in 2022, a chance to develop in KU’s system.
With Rice in 2023-24, the 6-foot-3, 185-pound guard played in 31 games and started one, averaging 3.9 points per game while shooting 32.4% from deep. That followed a freshman season with Vanderbilt in which he worked his way into more playing time down the stretch but on the whole played in just 14 games.
Shelby had chosen Vanderbilt over offers from Arizona, Arkansas, Baylor, Texas and more; in fact, KU had also offered him a scholarship as he was coming up at Texas’ Greenhill School.
Shelby has some familiarity with KU’s current personnel as a former teammate of incoming transfer Rylan Griffen (Alabama) on the Team Trae Young AAU team.
While he won’t play during the 2024-25 season, in the short term the native of McKinney, Texas, provides another guard who can handle the ball and shoot 3s in practice, after freshman Labaron Philon’s recent decommitment. Beginning in his redshirt sophomore year the following season, he could have a chance to help replace some of the production of Dajuan Harris Jr. and Zeke Mayo, who by then will have graduated.
Shelby’s arrival closely follows that of freshman walk-on Will Thengvall, from Wichita, who committed to KU on Tuesday.
AP Photo/Mark Humphrey
