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Video footage supplied by the University of Washington this week showed Jasir Rencher shooting baseline jumpers, driving to the basket for a dunk and even lifting heavy weights.

All of these were encouraging signs for the 6-foot-5 swingman, who experienced a couple of episodes of accelerated heartbeat as a freshman that shut down his season early and subjected him to an in-season medical procedure.

"Any time you're dealing with your heart, it's obviously a very serious deal," UW coach Danny Sprinkle said at the time.

The darkest and most unsettling images of college basketball are those of Loyola Marymount forward Hank Gathers -- one of the game's greatest players at the time -- collapsing at midcourt in a 1990 West Coast Conference tournament game against Portland and dying a short time later.

Under a doctor's supervision, Gathers was taking doses of medicine to try and deal with his own accelerated heartbeat after collapsing in an earlier game months earlier against UC Santa Barbara.

Gathers was so talented he had a 48-point, 13-rebound performance against LSU and Shaquille O'Neal between cardiac episodes.

Yet he was gone in an instant. He dunked and 13 seconds later tragedy ended everything.

Three and a half decades later, Rencher hopefully has the benefit of modern medicine advances to safely guide him.

While he appeared in just eight games for the Huskies, he is one of the sole survivors of a once glistening five-player recruiting class brought to Montlake that for the most part has been dissembled.

Power forward Hannes Steinbach is in the NBA and there was no way to prevent that from happening.

Guards JJ Mandaquit and Courtland Muldrew transferred to Arizona and Georgia Tech, respectively.

Both had their customized talents, though scoring the basketball in large bunches wasn't was one of them.

Besides Rencher, all that's left is 6-foot-10 forward Niko Dzepina, who currently is playing well with three productive outings for the Serbian national team in the FIBA U20 Eurobasket tournament in Slovenia.

Rencher quite possibly was the most athletic of the Huskies' five first-year players last year, playing above the rim while able to swing from the backcourt to the front court. He originally committed to Texas A&M before flipping to the UW when the Aggies coach Buzz Williams left for Maryland.

"He wants to be great, he really does," Sprinkle said. "He doesn't know how to get there. It's up to the coaches to show him."

Rencher suffered his first heartbeat issue shortly after arriving at the UW last summer. He had a repeat episode during a walk-through in January at Indiana and was done.

Meanwhile, he had been just trying to get acclimated to the college game, which often isn't easy for a young player.

"It was tough for me a little bit -- it's different game," Rencher said during the season. "When you come from being that guy to having a smaller role, it's been different for me. I'm focusing on what I can do to get on the floor."

He's doing that in more than one way, too.


This article first appeared on Washington Huskies on SI and was syndicated with permission.

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