Recruiting Report: Luke Appel (2018)
A 6-foot-7 shooting guard will almost always be in high demand at the college level, and Marshalltown’s Luke Appel is certainly no exception.
Currently, the junior wing has slight interest from schools at nearly all levels, and has aspirations to play at the highest level.
“I’ve had all the smaller Iowa schools contact me, and I’ve been getting letters from Elon, and Sioux Falls sends me stuff a lot. Ever since I played with Pure Prep at the end of last summer my recruitment has picked up a lot,” he said.
“Hopefully I’ll get a mid-major Division I school by the end of the summer and hopefully after my senior season I can commit to a Division I school somewhere.”
Iowa’s 60th-ranked 2018, Appel has been a wing as long as we’ve seen him play the past three seasons. But with his size has been asked to learn and play some post with his high school team.
“This past season I worked a lot on posting up. In the summer I have people that get me the ball and other posts that do that, but with Marshalltown I have to do some posting up, and inside scoring,” said Appel, who explained to PHIA why it was he struggled shooting the ball this past winter.
“I was overthinking everything and I was always worried about shooting, and you’re not going to shoot good if every time you shoot you’re thinking about what’s wrong. I had an awful shooting year, and me and my dad have been working on my shot and I’m shooting a lot better now. I’m really excited to see how well I shoot this summer.”
He’ll be getting buckets for one of the state’s best teams this spring and summer, Iowa Dynasty 17U. It’s with them where he’ll look to correct his shot, and improve upon his 21.2 percent clip he shot from deep this past winter.
“I’ll play the two or the the three with them. We want to win most of the tournaments we play here in Iowa, that’s our goal,” said Appel. “And we want to play in platinum brackets in the out-of-state tournaments, so we have college coaches actually looking at us.”