Jim Les is seeking his 100th victory as the Aggie head coach on Thursday evening against CSUN. Ailene Voisin of the Sacramento Bee wrote a nice article about Les as he nears this threshold and about the rise of Aggie basketball from Big West cellar dweller to annual contender.

I thought the section about recruiting was very interesting:

For all of the attributes – lovely campus, college town, great location for biking and hiking – the university’s academic demands substantially reduces the pool of potential recruits and forces the Aggies to search far and wide.

“We want to get more involved internationally,” Les said, “places like Australia, Serbia, all over Europe. The world has shrunk and the administration has been great about recognizing that. They said, ‘We will give you the resources to compete against the Ivy League, Stanford, the top academic schools in the country.’ And because of last year’s success, we are in some places that we weren’t sure we would be in. Now it’s your ability to close, for a young man to look at this as a unique opportunity. We just have to look a little harder, that’s all.”

He also talked about the need to clean up cheating in college basketball:

“I want the game cleaned up,” Les said forcefully after practice Monday. “For the guys that try to do it the right way, it’s been very frustrating because we all know it’s been going on for a very long time. You see guys (analysts) on TV, and they say, ‘Oh, he’s a great recruiter.’ Yeah, well, with a shoebox full of hundreds, it would be easy to be a great recruiter. But I just think it’s wrong. Many of us realize the NCAA doesn’t have the resources to solve the problem, but just the fact they’re trying to clean up the game is encouraging. I don’t care what steps they have to take. Clean it up. Just the perception that it’s out there I think has scaled it (corruption) back.”

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/ailene-voisin/article196289909.html#storylink=cpy