BATON ROUGE – The LSU Athletics Department and head basketball coach Johnny Jones said during his Wednesday media session that the compliance department had received and approved the signing day papers of Australian guard Kieran Hayward of Sydney, Australia.
The 6-5 guard made an official visit to the LSU campus this past weekend for LSU’s 98-72 exhibition victory Friday night over Southwest Baptist.
Hayward made his mark in the AAU tournaments that the AUSA program participated in this past summer.
“Kieran Hayward is the one that we have in, an Australian kid that visited over the weekend,” said Jones in his media session. “Kieran is an excellent shooter and continues to develop. He came over and played with one of his AAU teams during the summer. He had really a good summer and took a couple of visits early on and … ended up committing on his visit. We are excited about him coming in next year, especially after we are going to lose guys like a Keith Hornsby. We are hopeful as a freshman that he can come in and these guys continue to improve that are on our team now and hopefully he will come in and be one of those guys who will be able to play a role like that. I think his strength is shooting the basketball. It’s probably one of his biggest strengths.”
Hayward played at St. Joseph’s in Sydney and is ranked No. 8 in the class of 2016 by AUSA. Because of the different school calendars he has already finished his high school course work and will continue to work on his game before coming to LSU for the 2016-17 season.
He was the “First Captain of Basketball” in 2014-15 as well as the team basketball MVP. He was a member of the Great Public Schools First Representative Side and the C.I.S. First Side in 2015. He also was on the New South Wales State Team Reserve U20.