Queens basketball made the jump to the Division I level ahead of the 2022-23 campaign. Now, they have punched their ticket to the Big Dance by winning the ASUN conference tournament by defeating top-seeded Central Arkansas, 98-93, in overtime.
After the game, head coach Grant Leonard took to X, formerly Twitter, to point out that an SEC assistant was trying to poach his players for next year, during the game.
“We had an SEC assistant buy a courtside seat for one of our conference tournament games to ‘get ahead' of recruiting on of my kids,” Leonard posted.
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'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.
“Any of these clowns that think they’re gonna reach out to my guys before the season ends and start sending the DMs, and having third-party (contact), I will find you,” Hodgson told The Field of 68. “I’m not like the rest of these college basketball coaches. We will have a face-to-face conversation, I can promise you that.
“I want it out there, because there are some real clowns out there,” Hodgson added. “It may work with other people, it doesn’t work with me. We’ll all be in Indianapolis — I will find you.”
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.
