Interim athletic director Beth Goetz said there was no link between the Minnesota men's basketball team's foreign tour last summer and the recruitment of two international players.
Sports Illustrated wrote Wednesday that since 2010 each of the 11 NCAA basketball programs that had booked tours with Promosport & Tours — a company on Gran Canaria, a tiny Spanish island — also had signed at least one player who competed at Canarias Basketball Academy, an elite basketball program on the island.
Gophers sophomores Bakary Konate and Gaston Diedhiou, who were recruited six months before the contract was signed, both played briefly at the academy. One of the assistants there is also the travel company's operations director. Konate spent one year at Sunrise Christian Academy in Kansas, where he was recruited, before joining the Gophers.
"There is just no connection between the recruitment of our players and the fact that after we were well into the recruiting process — Bakary was already enrolled in school and Gaston was already here doing ESL classes — we made the commitment to go with that group," Goetz said Wednesday while traveling with the Gophers to the Big Ten tournament in Indianapolis.
The NCAA allows schools to take foreign tours every four years. This August, the Gophers took a 10-day excursion through Barcelona and Madrid, where they won four exhibition games. The Pioneer Press reported that the trip cost $224,245, which was funded by program boosters and approved by former athletic director Norwood Teague. Sports Illustrated said that trip was the priciest of any of the foreign trips they analyzed.
Goetz said the athletic department chose Promosport based on a recommendation and after calling administrators at other schools who had taken tours with them in the past. She called it a "great academic and athletic opportunity," and pointed out that, as SI reported, no rules were broken.
"That said, NCAA rules change all the time," she said. "We are going to follow rules and be really diligent about that. We obviously check everything we do with our compliance staff at the time. And so if at some point in time they make a determination that a particular group is somebody that NCAA institutions shouldn't work with, we'll obviously follow along with that. Until then, I think we've done our due diligence."
Amelia Rayno • 612-673-4115