When considering his supremely successful high school basketball run, the number 11 was at the top of his brain and tip of his tongue; that’s how many losses his Olympus High squads totaled in his time playing for his school in the suburbs of the southeast Salt Lake valley.

Olympus, the dominant Class 5A club, is now a three-time reigning state champion, going 97-11 in Lowe’s four seasons with a 14-1 record in the playoffs. Now, he’s bringing that temperament north to Ogden to continue his basketball career.

Lowe, the 5-foot-11 guard who twice won Utah basketball player of the year honors (both from MaxPreps and the Deseret News), committed to Weber State on Friday. As a senior, Lowe averaged 25.3 points, 5.4 rebounds, 5.8 assists and 3.5 steals per game; he’s the 14th player, and seventh freshman, lined up for WSU’s 2025-26 roster.

He hasn’t had a straightforward recruiting process but, this week, he stepped on campus to join workouts.

Photo supplied, Gavin Lowe

“Go Wildcats; I think it will become more real (when I get on the court) but it’s definitely something I’ve processed and I’m on board with, all the way,” Lowe told the Standard-Examiner. “What happened in past recruiting, I’ve got to get over everything pretty quick and when Weber State and everything got settled, I was all-in once I made that decision.”

Hating to lose isn’t unique; nobody in sports likes losing. But for Lowe, it’s what comes next that makes it less of a sour attitude and more of an approach to the game.

“I think the best aspect of my game is my competitiveness. It’s all about winning games,” he said. “I don’t really like to lose, and a big part of that is working out in the summer and getting better. In a game sense … there’s never a time when we’d give up.

“Everyone has bad games and we had bad games every season, but it’s that drive to continue on and pick it up in areas like toughness, defense, those things. That’s what I want to bring.”

So why Weber State? Lowe, who said he did not have any contact with WSU’s previous coaching staff, signed with UC Irvine before his senior season (in the early period) when choosing between the Anteaters and Utah Valley, both top-end programs in their conferences. But due to changing circumstances, Lowe later sought a release from Irvine.

That ended up being a long, somewhat acrimonious process, he said, and Irvine didn’t release Lowe from his signing until about three weeks ago. With many teams already starting summer workouts, Lowe said he wanted to move quickly. He didn’t take any official visits, but did drive up to Ogden to speak with new head coach Kaleb Canales as part of his considerations.

“First and foremost, he’s a really good dude. That was a major part of it,” Lowe said about Canales. “Getting to know him, he’s really high energy, someone you want to be around every day but also someone I can learn a lot from. Him and the staff, they’ve been around some of the best guys in the world at basketball. They see how those guys work, they know what it takes to be that.

“So learning from him, from a basketball standpoint and being who he is as a person, that really interested me in playing for Coach Canales.”

Lowe declined to name the two other serious suitors he had in the past few weeks, saying he respected the coaches and their efforts, but he and his parents were oriented toward Weber State after considering the factors.

“I wanted to get on campus wherever I’d be as quick as possible. … With the whole new staff, it was exciting. I really like Canales; the new staff, to me, seems amazing,” Lowe said. “My two main things were development and opportunity. It was: is there an opportunity for me to come in and be the player I know I can be, and how well can the coaches help me translate my game and help me get better?”

Being a three-time state champ and two-time state player of the year, Lowe said he didn’t really feel slighted by either go-round of his recruiting process. Before his senior year, he knew in the back of his mind that it was his shooting that might have limited his recruiting. According to stats entered into MaxPreps, Lowe shot 50% overall but just 31% from the 3-point line on 80 attempts.

“My mentality was to get better, and see what I could get better at, and everything would work itself out. I always wanted to keep that mentality, just get better at something every day,” he said.

His senior year, he shot 164 3-point attempts and raised his average to 38%.

“I became not just someone who could hit it, but someone who was a big threat behind the arc,” Lowe said. “Second go-round … (coaches) were talking a lot about my shooting, and that wasn’t something that wasn’t brought up before; that was nice to hear.”

Lowe and his family have been in the Salt Lake area for the past 10 or so years. But he’s familiar with Northern Utah; he lived in Huntsville in his early years, and he has grandparents who still live in the Ogden Valley.

He’s only played two high school games at the Dee Events Center, and one of them was the lone playoff loss he experienced. Olympus won a quarterfinal game his freshman year before losing a semifinal at the Purple Palace.

“We had a good quarterfinal, so that’s the good memory. The bad memory came the next game,” he said.

Lowe said he plans to study business administration at WSU.

Lowe is now the fourth Utahn on Weber’s 2026-27 roster, joining Hunter Hansen, Brock Felder and Chamberlain Burgess (plus however one might count Alvin Jackson III).

This will be the first time in nine years since WSU had more than one Utah native on scholarship (2017-18 had three: Brekkott Chapman, Riley Court, Brenden Morris). WSU has not had four Utahns on scholarship since Randy Rahe’s first season in 2006-07 (Tyler Billings, Dan Henry, Brody Van Brocklin, Steve Panos).