The pair of consensus top-100 recruits of Matt Thomas and Monte Morris had very different high school basketball experiences.

Thomas wasn’t a part of the national recruiting scene until the summer before his senior year, when he went on the national AAU circuit and his stock skyrocketed up the ESPN.com’s rankings before finally resting at No. 51.

Morris was a player who had been on the big stage for high school hoops most of his high school life and cracked ESPN.com’s top-100 coming in at No. 84, but was named Michigan’s Mr. Basketball his senior year at Beecher High School.

Despite the different roads to Ames, ISU basketball coach Fred Hoiberg praised both men in his opening statement at the team’s media day Oct. 11, saying both would be players who would be logging minutes early and often.

“Monte Morris has been very, very good for us,” Hoiberg said. “I knew he was a good player, but the learning curve for a freshman point guard is as high as you’re going to find. Monte has done a tremendous job.

“He’s a low-turnover guy, he’ll get you into an offense and he makes tremendous decisions,” Hoiberg said. “So he’s a guy that can get us going and will be a player that I think plays minutes for us as a freshman.”

Hoiberg went out of his way to point out that Morris only had three turnovers through six practices, which could be a far cry from the point guard of last year in Korie Lucious, who took until the Big 12 portion of the season to fix his turnover troubles, averaging four turnovers per game through the non-conference schedule.

“I’d say the big learning curve for me is defensively and always going that extra mile, 100 percent, don’t take any plays off,” Morris said. “Other than that I feel like I’m learning well and adjusting to things.”

Thomas is a two-time, all-state performer, who hit 59 3-pointers on a 36 percent clip his senior year at Onalaska, Wis. In Hoiberg’s spread-out offense, he’s the type of player who can thrive, which is a big reason Thomas said he came to play in Ames.

“Matt Thomas has really been shooting the ball well, especially these last few practices,” Hoiberg said. “He’s starting to understand our spacing concepts. Again, he’s a guy, with the way we like to play, he can get a lot of minutes for us.”

Thomas has been busy adjusting to the intensity of the college practices, talking to the media with scratches up and down his arms and a left black eye. He’s especially adapting when there’s a playing time up for grabs, the way Hoiberg says there is among the backcourt of guards.

“Every day we’re getting after it,” Thomas said. “I mean I’ve got scratches all over the place. I got a black eye the other day, so we’re going after it for sure. You have to take that mindset into every practice, you’ve got to play your hardest like you would in any situation.”