Basketball recruiting: Germantown Academy’s Jaye Haynes is a Villanova fan who will play next season at La Salle

Jaye and Jon Haynes will each be trading in their college apparel later this fall.

Jon Haynes went to Germantown Friends and starred at Villanova from 1992-95.

His daughter, Jaye, is taking a different path.

The Germantown Academy star senior signed her letter of intent in May to play basketball at Big 5 rival La Salle.

Jaye Haynes was around the Villanova program through her father’s connection when she was a youngster, and everyone knew she had all the Wildcats’ gear.

“My friends would ask me if I had any extra stuff and it was always ‘Yeah, what do you need to borrow?’ I always had something,” Jaye Haynes said.

But now, Haynes will be donning La Salle colors -- and so will her father.

“I love Villanova. Once a Wildcat, always a Wildcat," Jon Haynes said. "But I’m Team Haynes. I’m wearing the La Salle gear.”

Jaye Haynes, also a star on the Lady Runnin Rebels AAU team, was a four-year starter, averaged 16.1 points per game as a senior, won the Inter-Academic League’s MVP award and helped lead the Patriots to the PAISSA semifinals.

She said she had more than 10 scholarship offers, but La Salle, Villanova and DePaul made her top three.

It helped that La Salle coach Mountain MacGillivray was interested in Haynes when he coached Quinnipiac in 2017, when Haynes was a freshman.

The interest heightened when MacGillivray took over at La Salle in April 2018, and it was the first school to extend an offer to Haynes during her junior season.

Haynes said she had a feeling La Salle would be the school she’d choose after taking an unofficial visit last April.

“To me, it came back to looking at one school and comparing it to La Salle,” she said of her decision.

One of the big turning points for Haynes were the plans and expectations La Salle had for her out of the gate.

“They had goals for me that I didn’t realize I could achieve there. ... A-10 player of the year, rookie of the year, rookie of the week,” she said. “And I thought, ‘Wow, that could really be me in the fall of 2020.' So definitely those visions influenced my decision.”

Something as simple as texting and social media is what makes the recruiting process of today different from when Jon Haynes went through it in the early 1990s. He said he appreciated the old-school way La Salle’s coaching staff went about recruiting his daughter.

“They reached out to me a lot and reached out to my wife,” Jon said. “They got to know our family, and it was really hands-on. It had that old-school recruiting feel verses some coaches now. It’s different. Coaches are able to text the kids and contact the kids. You can actually talk to the kid without talking to the parents.

“You could tell how much a school really likes you if they reach out to the family as well.”

Now that Jaye Haynes will be attending La Salle, she may not be wearing her Villanova gear anymore. But she won’t give it away, either, because the Wildcats tradition is still near and dear to her family.

Like Jon Haynes, who spent 10 years in Europe playing professionally, Jaye wants to follow in his footsteps after college and continue her career.

For now, though, Jaye is focused on helping the Explorers, who are 12-15 this season, improve.

“I want to help rebuild the program and just get us some wins and contribute with what I can,” she said. “I know right now they have some really great players, and it’s going to be a challenge to earn my spot. But I’m really excited to do that because that makes the team better and myself better.”