The secret to BYU basketball’s future? It might be this former blogger.

Newark, N.J. • It was little more than a throwaway line, really.

Justin Young, a 20-something with a recruiting blog, cobbled together a column on some underrated prospects. It was the end of July 2006 in muggy Orlando — the last stop on the AAU circuit that even some college coaches didn’t want to endure — and Young emptied his notebook.

He started with Scotty Hopson, a future Tennessee guard with prototypical size, and wound his way to Latavious Williams, who eventually went straight to the NBA and never panned out. Young assessed Williams was “built like a hoss, plays like a hoss and will probably be recruited by the hosses a.k.a. the SEC.”

And eight players later, tucked away in the 13th paragraph, Young saved room for a little-known guard who left an impression on him. He watched him drop 23 points against a top team from Jacksonville and chatted with him outside the Milk House — a warehouse structure with three gyms on the Disney campus.

“Jimmer Fredette has caught on to the fun, too,” Young wrote. “The muscular 6-foot-4 guard is the AAU National’s version of J.J. Redick. Only bigger and stronger. He’s dialing it in from deep. Rarely has he missed when the game is on the line.”

It was some of the first ink for the kid from Glens Falls, New York — who would change college basketball in Provo forever. He committed to BYU two months later, with only a few competing offers from Siena and Marshall.

“I bet BYU even didn’t think, ‘We got this absolutely rock star,‘” Young recalled recently, laughing. “ I mean, I wrote just a blurb. It might have been the only thing ever written on him. But that was the fun of it. I remember we had a good chat.”

Now, the man who helped find Jimmer is finding AJ Dybantsa for BYU.

Young is the director of recruiting for the Cougars’ budding behemoth. Head coach Kevin Young, Justin’s younger brother, convinced him to come to the team side and use his recruiting prowess there.

Kevin Young shapes BYU on the court. But before it gets to him, Justin puts the pieces in his hand.

It’s pronounced Ginóbili

In the backroom of the Youngs’ Marietta, Georgia, home, Kevin Young heard his brother talking with Ryen Russillo, then a Boston radio guy.

Justin broke down film of NBA prospects for hours and distilled their virtues to radio hosts across the country. An obscure name coming out in the draft in the early 2000s was Manu Ginóbili from Argentina — the future San Antonio Spurs star. Justin had his eyes set.

“He really cut his teeth doing NBA draft analysis, stuff like that,” Kevin Young said. “Ginóbili was coming out when he was doing some radio show. That was my first memory of it. And then he kind of broke off into the prep space.”

“I pronounced it Gin-OB-blee,” Justin remembered.

Of the Young brothers, Kevin was the star athlete — a captain point guard who averaged 15 and six and led his team to 27 wins in his senior year. He always knew he’d follow his high school coach, Roger Kaum, into the profession.

And Justin was the journalist. He broke his ankle during his sophomore year in Texas and couldn’t move well. His high school paper was run by a former war correspondent and teachers nudged him in that direction.

“I wanted to do that,” Justin said. “Then I caught the basketball bug.”

It became more like an addiction. When Kevin was still in high school, Justin hit the road 30 weekends a year, grinding on the AAU circuit and finding little nuggets for his columns.

Recruiting news was in its infancy — nothing like the monster industry now with 247Sports and On3, known for its viral social media graphics. But it was growing in popularity with the rise of Sonny Vaccaro at Nike and the number of high schoolers going straight to the NBA.

“That era, the post-LeBron era, to about 2009 was, man ...,” Justin said. “Basically everybody that is in the NBA — that’s like a guy now — those are the dudes we were covering.”

Justin wanted to tap into that world, and he had an easy route. He was based out of Atlanta, where Dwight Howard was a budding superstar. At 6-foot-10 from Southwest Atlanta Christian Academy, everyone knew Howard was the top pick in the draft. It was just a matter of whether he’d attend college or go straight to the league.

Justin followed him everywhere, knowing that was his ticket.

“I’m like a white dude in the African American part of town just showing up for these games,” Young said. “And a guy named Wallace Prather, a really powerful AAU guy in Atlanta, comes up to me and says, ‘I know you are not here to see your nephew play.‘”

And that was his in. Justin was hired by Rivals.com. It was then a mom and pop shop out of Nashville, literally a website run out of a garage, but they wanted Howard news. Young could provide it. His column was titled “Just a Minute.”

Justin remembers staying in Bally’s off the Las Vegas Strip for $37 a night to watch the next generation play. Greg Odom, OJ Mayo, LeBron. He hit the road with Prather looking for talent in remote towns — Prather recruiting players and Young wanting intel.

After Kevin graduated, he’d bum a room and come along to evaluate talent. They watched Kevin Durant play in Vegas, a player Kevin would eventually coach on the Phoenix Suns 17 years later.

“We stayed in Vegas for 12 straight days watching guys,” Justin said. “Kevin was grinding, too, just starting out as a coach then.”

And as both Young brothers got bigger, finding stars and being around basketball savants was their foundation. Justin moved to Yahoo.com when Rivals was bought out, becoming a national recruiting editor by his mid-20s. Kevin Young rose up through the coaching ranks eventually as a head coach in the G League and an assistant on the 76ers and Suns.

“It became our normal,” Justin said.

Normal would become critical later on.

Landing AJ

Last October, Kevin instructed Justin to run point on the research.

Inside BYU’s basketball offices, Young was preparing for the biggest recruiting pitch of his coaching career. The world’s No. 1 prospect, AJ Dybantsa, was coming to Provo on an official visit. A commitment from the 6-foot-9, potential top NBA draft pick, would put the Cougars into a different stratosphere of college hoops — and launch Young into an elite coaching category.

“We did some research. I think I coached like 31 lottery picks. Justin’s worked with tons of guys who were top-five picks,” Kevin said. “We showed AJ, like, ‘Man, these are the guys we’ve been around in our careers.’ I think guys that are at the level AJ is, I think there’s comfort in knowing, ‘These guys have worked with guys like me before.‘”

Along with his recruiting dispatches, Justin had created a recruiting service that worked with over 300 colleges. He ran recruiting camps starting in 2005 and Kevin helped coach.

Top talent rolled in. Malcolm Brogdon and Jeremy Lamb were players Kevin Young worked with. Later on, Zion Williamson, Jaylen Brown and Anthony Edwards came through.

The coaches were equally famous. Kellen Sampson, Houston coach Kelvin Sampson’s son, worked there. Mfon Udofia, now the G League coach for the Brooklyn Nets, helped out.

Kevin Young connected with Dennis Felton at Providence and met Sharman White, Dybantsa’s future coach with USA Basketball.

“I wanted it to be a place where if a coach was between jobs, he could come and meet recruits and use that to get a job elsewhere,” Justin said. One camp in Louisville had 1,100 teams playing on 72 courts.

When Kevin had a G League job himself, he leaned on Justin for guidance. He was essentially the general manager along with being the head coach.

“I was making personnel decisions. He was super helpful in just giving me intel on players,” Kevin said.

It carried over into the NBA, with Kevin phoning Justin for info. “He just knows everybody. He knows everything about every player,” the Cougars’ coach said. “So if there was a guy, even when I was in the league and we were looking at somebody in free agency, I’d call him.”

They didn’t know it at the time, but they were preparing for the future.

When it came time for Dybantsa’s visit to Provo, Justin guided Kevin on how to attack the recruitment. Keep it simple, he urged.

After the visit, Justin waited with the Dybantsas outside while their car was coming.

“We are just shooting the breeze and AJ goes, ‘You are the most normal people I’ve been around,‘” Justin said.

He texted Kevin, “We got him.”

Kevin was hesitant to believe it, but Justin explained, “You don’t hear kids say that. There was a level of comfortability. Normalcy matters.”

He compared it to his Christmas lights theory of recruiting, an analogy he knows is “stupid.”

“I live in this neighborhood in Arizona where Christmas lights are everything. On TV, they’re all decorated. That’s kind of like how coaching is. Every staff wants to go all out, have the inflatables and all that. I just want white lights and leaves,” he said.

The Youngs spent a lifetime around players like Dybantsa. They knew he was looking for white lights.

Overtaking Jimmer

Sitting on the bench inside Ball Arena last week, as BYU knocked off Wisconsin to head to the Sweet 16, Justin Young saw Fredette sitting in the second row across the floor.

He thought back to when he was watching him as a 15-year-old in Orlando.

Now Fredette was watching Young and his brother take the Cougars to heights they haven’t seen since Jimmermania.

It’s only the third time BYU is in the Sweet 16 in program history and the Youngs did it in year one.

The brothers haven’t talked about the gravity of it all yet.

Maybe they will when this magical March run is over.

But they did take a moment on the phone after Dybantsa committed.

“I was like, ‘Man, this is pretty cool. The first year we team up together, man, we’re able to get the number one player in the country.’ Because of the teamwork of the whole staff,” Kevin Young said.

The two brothers are remaking BYU into a national power.

“I think our family is wired like, ‘Why can’t we do certain things?’ He’s helped me carry that torch here,” Kevin finished.

It’s a long way from the Milk House in Orlando.

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