{"id":160607,"date":"2026-03-11T18:42:34","date_gmt":"2026-03-11T18:42:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/160607\/"},"modified":"2026-03-11T18:42:34","modified_gmt":"2026-03-11T18:42:34","slug":"coach-accuses-sec-assistant-of-buying-seat-to-recruit-player","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/160607\/","title":{"rendered":"Coach accuses SEC assistant of buying seat to recruit player"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Queens basketball made the jump to the Division I level ahead of the 2022-23 campaign. Now, they have <a href=\"https:\/\/clutchpoints.com\/ncaa-basketball\/clutchpoints-bracketology-bubble-hanging-on-dear-life\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">punched their ticket to the Big Dance<\/a> by winning the ASUN conference tournament by defeating top-seeded Central Arkansas, 98-93, in overtime.<\/p>\n<p>After the game, head coach Grant Leonard took to X, formerly Twitter, to point out that an SEC assistant was <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/QUCoachGrant\/status\/2031705308083486903?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2031705308083486903%7Ctwgr%5E3a205165820bcad92f12d7884256446b682ee8a5%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.on3.com%2Fnews%2Fqueens-head-coach-grant-leonard-accuses-sec-assistant-of-buying-courtside-seat-to-get-ahead-on-recruitment-of-player%2F\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">trying to poach his players<\/a> for next year, during the game.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe had an SEC assistant buy a courtside seat for one of our conference tournament games to \u2018get ahead&#8217; of recruiting on of my kids,\u201d Leonard posted.<\/p>\n<p>The ASUN conference tournament was held in Jacksonville, Florida, directly in the heart of SEC country. While Leonard did not name the school that had their assistant at the game recruiting, many schools are within a day&#8217;s drive of where the tournament was taking place. The Queens coach quoted a post from The Field of 68, in which USF head coach Bryan Hodgson was speaking about other teams trying to take his players.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAny of these clowns that think they\u2019re gonna reach out to my guys before the season ends and start sending the DMs, and having third-party (contact), I will find you,\u201d Hodgson told The Field of 68. \u201cI\u2019m not like the rest of these college basketball coaches. We will have a face-to-face conversation, I can promise you that.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI want it out there, because there are some real clowns out there,\u201d Hodgson added. \u201cIt may work with other people, it doesn\u2019t work with me. We\u2019ll all be in Indianapolis \u2014 I will find you.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>USF won the American Conference regular season title and will be the number one seed in the conference tournament. They open up their tournament play in the semifinals on March 14.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Queens basketball made the jump to the Division I level ahead of the 2022-23 campaign. Now, they have&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":160608,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[63551,13629,9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-160607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-march-madness","tag-ncaa-basketball","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160607\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/160608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}