EL PASO, Texas (KTSM) – One of the best prep basketball players to ever play in El Paso will spend his final year of high school outside of the Sun City.
KJ Lewis, a four-star recruit in the Class of 2023 committed to the University of Arizona, will attend Duncanville High School and play his senior season with the Panthers in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, he and his family told KTSM. He is already enrolled within the Duncanville Independent School District.
Lewis made the announcement on his social media pages on Tuesday.
He and his mother, Monica Ramirez, have already moved to Duncanville, after Ramirez accepted a job teaching special education at Duncanville High School. She was a guidance counselor at Burges High School in El Paso the last few years and has built a career as a high school coach and teacher all over Texas, including as the head girls basketball coach at Midland Legacy.
Lewis spent his first three years of high school at Chapin in northeast El Paso, where he led the Huskies to a pair of Class 5A Sweet 16s in 2021 and 2022. A 6’4 guard rated as a consensus top-60 player in the Class of 2023, Lewis hopes to one day play in the NBA.
Consistently one of the best boys basketball programs in the entire state of Texas over the last decade, Duncanville has won the last three Class 6A state championships (2019, 2021, 2022) and was a favorite to do so in the 2020 season that was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’ll be a big step (to Duncanville) just because of how they operate over there from winning multiple state championships in a row, and just their work ethic,” said Lewis.
Lewis will play with some talented players at Duncanville, including Ronald Holland, a top-15 prospect in the Class of 2023 that played AAU basketball with Lewis for parts of two summers on a Dallas-based team.
During his junior season at Chapin in 2021-22, Lewis averaged 18.7 points, 4.8 rebounds, 2.2 assists and 2.8 steals as he took the Huskies to their second consecutive Sweet 16 appearance. As a sophomore in 2020-21, Lewis put up averages of 25 points, five rebounds, four assists and five steals per game.
“When he makes it to the NBA, people in El Paso will realize how special it was to be a part of this journey,” said Chapin boys basketball coach Rodney Lewis, who just finished his fourth year as the coach of the Huskies. “We will continue to be family. What kind of coach would I be to be upset? That would be selfish of me. I’m very supportive of him.”
His skillset as an athletic, playmaking, defensive-minded guard with an improving jump-shot should help Lewis on the court at Duncanville, as will his basketball IQ.
The Arizona commit will finish out his final AAU season this summer, then it’ll be full steam ahead at Duncanville this fall.
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