Queens basketball coach Grant Leonard led his team to its first NCAA Tournament berth this season.
JEFF SINER
jsiner@charlotteobserver.com
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
Queens coach Grant Leonard says SEC assistant sat courtside at ASUN game to recruit.Leonard would not name the SEC school, but Charlotte Observer has confirmed it was Auburn.Leonard, whose team has qualified for NCAA tourney, says he’ll raise issue at Final Four.
Queens basketball coach Grant Leonard said Wednesday he was “extremely frustrated” that an assistant coach from an SEC school sat courtside during a Queens game at the Atlantic Sun tournament, so the coach could apparently get a head start on recruiting a player from the current Queens basketball team.
Leonard said he wouldn’t name the player nor the SEC team involved. But The Charlotte Observer has independently confirmed through a source that the school in question was Auburn, and that the coach was Auburn assistant Ian Borders.
Auburn, however, said Wednesday night through a spokesman that an assistant coach going to another conference’s basketball tournament was a “permissible activity.”
While Leonard didn’t want to talk about the specific school, coach or player — “I’m just not doing that,” he said — or specifically ever use the word “tampering,” he did go into detail about the situation in a phone interview with The Observer on Wednesday.
“In our coaching fraternity, it’s almost like the bar association,” said Leonard, whose Queens team qualified for its first NCAA Division I tournament on Sunday by upsetting Central Arkansas in overtime in the ASUN final in Jacksonville, Florida. “We have to police ourselves. And this is a road I don’t think we as coaches want to go down.
“Now I support the transfer portal, and I support our players getting life-changing money,” Leonard continued. “I’ve helped several of my players do exactly that. But this player isn’t in the portal right now, and this sort of thing is basically trying to coax them to enter it. I will definitely be bringing this up at the NABC convention at the Final Four.”
A Louisville-based journalist named Mike Rutherford first reported on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, that the assistant coach in question was Borders. A source later confirmed to The Observer that Borders was indeed the Auburn assistant who attended parts of the ASUN tournament, including the Queens game.
Auburn athletics spokesman Kirk Sampson responded to Observer questions about the incident Wednesday night by saying via email “it is a permissible activity” and noting a memo sent to Power Four schools on February 27 read in part: “A basketball staff member attending another conference’s basketball tournament would not be prohibited by 11.6 (Scouting of Opponents) since it is unlikely/impossible to be a future opponent at this time of the season.”
Added Sampson about this memo that Auburn believed gave it the right to attend other conference’s tournaments: “My understanding (was) it came from the NCAA, who shared with conferences and then on down to the institutions.”
Whether Leonard or Auburn is right is unclear. Leonard said his original social media post about the matter on Wednesday, which went viral, caused the NCAA to call him later that day.
“I didn’t mean to cause all of this,” Leonard said. “But I was extremely frustrated.”
The original post from Leonard read: “We had an SEC assistant buy a courtside seat for one of our conference tournament games to ‘get ahead’ of recruiting on (sic) of my kids.”
Leonard said the person he talked to at the NCAA told him that such an action would not have NCAA approval, although Auburn disagreed with that assessment.
“If we’re in a tournament, you’re allowed to live-scout your next opponent,” Leonard said. “But there were no SEC schools in our conference tournament, obviously, and scouting is different than recruiting.”
Queens head coach Grant Leonard celebrates after the Royals won the Atlantic Sun championship on Sunday in Jacksonville, Florida. The win over Central Arkansas gave Queens its first berth in the NCAA Tournament. Todd Drexler Courtesy of Atlantic Sun conference
Leonard said the game in question was not the ASUN final, but Queens’ quarterfinal matchup against West Georgia on Friday. He said his player and the SEC assistant coach had a brief courtside interaction before the game, although it was little more than saying hello.
Leonard added that the SEC assistant coach also attended another game that day and sat courtside, apparently because he was interested in at least one other player on a separate ASUN team as well.
Queens did play Auburn this season, in December, losing 106-65. Auburn (17-15) has had a disappointing season under first-year coach Steven Pearl. The Tigers are seeded 12th in the SEC basketball tournament, but did win their first-round SEC Tournament game Wednesday afternoon against Mississippi State.
Leonard said he didn’t publicly mention the incident when it happened, and thought about just not saying anything at all.
But the Queens coach said he was inspired by a comment this week by South Florida head basketball coach Bryan Hodgson, who told “The Field of 68” about other assistant coaches potentially recruiting his players while the season was still going on: “Any of these clowns that think they’re gonna reach out to my guys before the season ends and start sending DMs. … I will find you. … We will have a face-to-face conversation.”
“That brought some clarity to me,” Leonard said. “So I quote-tweeted his tweet and basically said, ‘This is happening.’”
A number of college coaches have now made allegations related to the transfer portal more public. Clemson coach Dabo Swinney is the foremost among them, as he recently accused Ole Miss of tampering with a player, laying out his allegation in extraordinary detail. Clemson reported Ole Miss to the NCAA.
Queens celebrates punching its ticket to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and March Madness on Sunday. Todd Drexler Courtesy of Atlantic Sun conference
Queens will have a selection party on its campus Sunday, and CBS cameras plan to be there. The Royals have been celebrating their biggest basketball moment in the sun all week. Queens-related social media accounts have garnered more than one billion impressions since Sunday, Leonard said.
But when it’s all over, the coach knows he’s going to lose some players off this team, because good teams at the lower levels of college basketball always do. The bigger schools simply have more money to pay players.
“And I will help them with their recruitment,” Leonard said of his soon-to-be ex-players. “I’ll make calls for them. I want them to get life-changing money.”
Leonard said the most money that any Queens player has been guaranteed by transferring to another school is approximately $500,000. Queens has a small NIL collective that Leonard and his staff control, but he can’t compete with numbers like that. Leonard said he’s fine with players transferring. He’s fine with his players being recruited elsewhere by bigger schools.
“But what I’m not fine with,” Leonard said, “is an SEC coach sitting courtside at our conference tournament.”
This story was originally published March 11, 2026 at 6:52 PM.
The Charlotte Observer
Columnist Scott Fowler has written for The Charlotte Observer since 1994 and has earned 26 APSE awards for his sportswriting. He hosted The Observer’s podcast “Carruth,” which Sports Illustrated once named “Podcast of the Year.” Fowler also conceived and hosted the online series and podcast “Sports Legends of the Carolinas,” which featured 1-on-1 interviews with NC and SC sports icons and was turned into a book. He occasionally writes about non-sports subjects, such as the 5-part series “9/11/74,” which chronicled the forgotten plane crash of Eastern Air Lines Flight 212 in Charlotte on Sept. 11, 1974.
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