Derby basketball star Kennedy Brown announces her verbal commitment

Kennedy Brown’s recruitment has been hard to follow by design.

Brown, a Derby senior center who is coming off a Class 6A state title, hasn’t kept a high Twitter profile. Even to the coaches who were trying to earn her verbal commitment, there was always a shadow of doubt until Saturday when she chose Oregon State.

“I’ve always said since I was little, ‘I want to go as far away as possible,’” she said. “(Coach Scott Rueck) actually used that as a technique to recruit me. He said, ‘I don’t think you can get any farther away from home.’“

Brown is the No. 4 post in the class of 2019 and the top player from Kansas, according to ESPN’s top 100. Some of the nation’s top programs have courted her, inclduing Baylor, Louisville and Tennessee.

She kept a low profile because that is just her personality, she said, but it was also to ensure those coaches didn’t get complacent or feel as if they were out of the running. That was a key to how Oregon State earned her verbal commitment.

“I built a really good connection with them early on,” she said. “I have a really good relationship with the head coach (Rueck). It’s something I don’t really have with any other coaches. We clicked from day one. He gets me, and I get him.

“Other coaches would say, ‘You must be really good at playing poker because I can’t read you.’ But that’s how I wanted it.”

Brown said she hasn’t had a chance to think back on the turbulence of her recruitment, to realize how special it was to have a historic program like Tennessee or a recently accomplished one like Baylor wanting her to come play for free.

But when asked about it, she started to realize the accomplishment.

“I look back on it, I’ve been to so many places,” she said. “I took a whole West Coast trip just to visit colleges.”

Brown took an official visit to Oregon State on Oct. 20. She toured the facilities, talked with potential teammates and took in a football game.

“My dad even told me, ‘I’ve never seen you so comfortable with a team before,’ ” she said. “After all these visits I’ve been on, he said, ‘I’ve never seen you fit in so well and seem so happy here.’ That was big for me that he could tell also.”

Oregon State has been a program on the rise in women’s college basketball since Rueck took over as coach in 2010.

During his tenure, the Beavers have reached the NCAA Tournament five times with three Sweet Sixteen appearances, two in the Elite Eight and a Final Four in 2016. Brown said that is important to her, and she wants to be part of it.

“I want to go somewhere where I can make a name for myself, and that program is already great, and the people there love them,” Brown said. “You go to Corvalis (Oregon), it’s women’s basketball. There’s no other sport like it.”