Report: UConn Violated Recruiting Contact Rules

This doesn't look good for Nate Miles or Uconn. It will be interesting to see what will be done to the school as punishment. If anything though it will put him in the spotlight for the upcoming recruiting class and will remember that he goes the extra mile. Even when it is against the rules.

By LYNN ZINSER

University of Connecticut men’s basketball coaches broke N.C.A.A. contact rules in the recruiting of Nate Miles, a former player, according to a report by Yahoo Sports on Wednesday. The article drew on cellphone records to detail contact among Miles, UConn coaches and a former student manager.

Yahoo cited multiple sources in establishing a relationship between Miles and Josh Nochimson, who became an agent after his years as a UConn student manager. By N.C.A.A. rules, Yahoo reported, Nochimson would be a representative of the college’s athletic interests. Therefore, providing Miles with lodging, transportation and meals, which the report alleges, would be a serious violation.

UConn officials declined to comment for the Yahoo article.

The controversy surrounds Miles, a 6-foot-7 swingman from Toledo, Ohio, who signed with UConn in 2007 and was expelled as a freshman in 2008 when he violated a restraining order obtained against him by a female student. (Miles played this season at the College of Southern Idaho, a junior college.)

N.C.A.A. rules limit contact to one phone call a month to recruits (or their family or associates) still in their junior year of high school, but Yahoo reported a stream of communications with Nochimson and significant phone calls and texts to Miles himself. Tom Moore, a former UConn assistant coach, was reported to have made 27 calls to Miles’s guardian and a man Miles called his uncle as well as three calls to Miles in December 2006 alone.

The Yahoo article, by Adrian Wojnarowski and Dan Wetzel, includes cellphone records obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request.