Eastern Oklahoma duo with major interest

Like most junior college coaches, Eastern Oklahoma's Jimmy Voight is just beginning the process of guiding his sophomores through the recruiting process.

"We got beat in the quarterfinals Thursday, the last quarterfinal game, and we didn't get back to campus until the wee hours of the morning on Friday," Voight said. "Then we were on spring break last week so we are just starting to weed through that process."

Voight has met with some of his players and will meet with the rest this week. He has a stack of phone messages from major colleges and gave us the update on two of his most highly recruited players.

"I talked with Kevin Palacios a little bit," Voight said. "He has three schools with offers on the table, talking about setting up visits. Those are Creighton, South Carolina and Houston. Some others have called and they have not told me they are going to offer him, but I think some of them are. I can't speak for their staffs, though."

Oklahoma, Purdue and Southern Cal are some of the other high major schools keeping tabs on the 6-foot-8 Venezuelan.

Meanwhile, Voight's point guard is drawing major interest as well. Mario Taybron came out of high school in the Class of 2003 with offers from Temple, Cincinnati, St. John's, Charlotte, Virginia Tech, North Carolina State, Old Dominion, James Madison and Virginia Commonwealth. He eventually signed with Temple and started the first six games of his freshman year, but was later dismissed from the team and transferred to Eastern Oklahoma.

"I think that says a lot because we all know coach Chaney's credentials, he's a hall of fame coach," Voight said. "To hand the ball to an incoming freshman last year, that says a lot about him and the talent he has."

Voight said Taybron started slowly this season, but he did guide Eastern Oklahoma to a 20-win season.

"At the beginning of the year, he had a lot of rust on his game. In fact, he didn't play much," said the coach. "But he had a pretty good year. Just look at the list of schools calling about him and I think that says he's got the kind of talent to do well."

That list is a long one for Taybron. Voight had calls from Purdue, Mississippi State, Arkansas, Charlotte, Florida State, Missouri, Virginia Tech, East Carolina, St. Bonaventure and Nebraska all in the last three weeks.

Voight said he'll sit down with Taybron later this week to discuss his situation. He does not yet know which of those calls could turn into offers or visits for the St. George, Va. native.

"Where he falls on their lists, they're not going to tell me whether he is number one or number two or way down the list," Voight said. "They want to keep the stove warm in case they miss out on people. I have not had anybody in that group want to try to schedule a visit, but some of calls that we missed, we had several phone calls and a lot of those were in regards to him."

Talk about this story on the Premium message board or the JucoJunction board.