The problem has been recruiting the level of player that we would like to get from Louisiana. There are plenty of Sun Belt and Southland caliber players in Louisiana. There aren't many that can take us to the next level, and the ones that are around ultimately go to bigger schools. This year's class we recruited a couple of guards that we didn't land. Brandon Rachal from Natchitoches Central is a big-time player who had a great relationship with the previous staff. After the coaching change, he eliminated us from his list and ultimately signed with LSU. Cedric Russell from Peabody is a big-time scorer who was really high on Tech. He was once an LSU commitment, but his stock cooled and LSU went in a different direction. He was going to take an official visit to Tech, but the weekend before, we took a commitment from another guard and pulled our offer. Russell ultimately signed with ULL, and I think he'll be a very good player there. There's a big kid at Carroll, Larry Owens, who is about 6-8 and 250 pounds. I know we were recruiting him at one point, but I'm not sure what happened. He may not have grades and may end up at a JUCO. (Edit this to say that Owens ended up signing with NSU, but I swear I was told he'd have to go JUCO.)
I do believe that the big time players from Alexandria on north, we should be all over those guys and recruiting heavily. There aren't normally a ton of them who can play at our level, and we lose a lot of those guys to the SEC schools or Big 12 schools.