Getting Adjusted
December 09, 2003 10:04 PM | General
December 9, 2003
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – When Mike Gansey decided to play college basketball at St. Bonaventure he did so with the notion of going to a small school where he could feel comfortable, play in a pretty good conference, and get an outstanding education.
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| Mike Gansey averaged 13.9 points per game last year at St. Bonaventure to rank 13th among Atlantic 10 scorers. (All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks) |
He liked Jim Barron and his St. Bonaventure coaching staff and the drive from Olmstead Falls, Ohio, to Olean, N.Y., wasn’t terribly far for his family to come and see him play. What began as the perfect situation for Mike Gansey ended up last spring being one of the most miserable experiences of his life.
Gansey never got a chance to play for Barron because he left to become the head coach at Rhode Island. His new coach was Jan van Breda Kolff and Mike noticed an immediate difference.
“He kind of let his assistants do the work,” said Gansey.
Inheriting Barron’s players, van Breda Kolff led St. Bonaventure to a 17-13 record during Gansey’s freshman season in 2001. The versatile 6-foot-4, 190-pound Gansey came off the bench to average 8.3 points per game.
“We had a good team my freshman year,” he said..
Last year, Gansey could sense that team chemistry was going to be a problem with some of the new recruits coming in.
“We had a bunch of new guys and we just didn’t gel,” he said. “We had some attitude problems and it just wasn’t fun.”
One of those new players was junior college center Jamil Terrell, who wound up not having an associate’s degree from Coastal Georgia Community College. Terrell was admitted to school with the full knowledge that he was ineligible for athletic competition.
Eventually, Terrell was declared ineligible after St. Bonaventure’s 25th game and the rest of the team decided by majority vote not to play its remaining two regular season games of the season against Massachusetts and Dayton.
“The stuff that happened there … I just wanted a change,” Gansey said diplomatically.
Gansey was the jack of all trades for St. Bonaventure last year, playing guard, small forward, power forward and even center at times. He began the year as a starter but soon grew more comfortable coming off the bench.
“We lost two games in a row and I’m superstitious so I was like, ‘Coach take me off the bench and maybe I can be a spark.’”
Gansey wound up ranking 13th in the Atlantic 10 in scoring averaging 13.9 points per game. He also finished 20th in rebounding at 5.0 boards per game and was eighth in three-point field goal percentage at 40.2 percent.
He scored double figures 21 times and had five games of 20 or more points. His best game came against Michigan where he scored 27 points on five of five from three-point range.
He also hit a game-tying three-point field goal at the buzzer to send the Boston College game into overtime.
Gansey managed to do all of this despite being asked to guard the opposing team’s power forwards and centers because some of St. Bonaventure’s big men didn’t quite pan out.
“Granted, the A-10 is a little different than the Big East, but by the end of the year I was just beat up,” he admitted. “I got kind of stuck in there. I was a buck-ninety trying to guard centers. It was tough.”
Even tougher was having to deal with the Jamil Terrell controversy and the impending NCAA investigation. Gansey wanted out. He wanted a fresh start.
There were several schools interested in Gansey.
His old coach Jim Barron at Rhode Island had an interest in taking Gansey, but A-10 transfer rules meant that he would have to sit out two years before he could play and would only have one year of eligibility left.
Even though Kent State and Cleveland State -- two schools not far from his hometown -- tried to recruit him out of high school, Gansey was more interested in getting away from home but at the same time not going too far.
He had offers from both Clemson and New Mexico but he became intrigued by what was going on down at West Virginia. He liked the fact that the Mountaineers played in the Big East conference and that Morgantown wasn’t too big.
Once he visited the campus, met the coaches and the players, he was sold on transferring.
“I loved the coaching staff, I loved the players and I just wanted to be here,” he said.
The situation at West Virginia couldn’t be more suitable for Gansey. He is part of a rising basketball program playing for a well respected player’s coach. Instead of going someplace where might have been pressured to play immediately, he can take this year to get ahead academically and get adjusted to Beilein’s complicated system.
“His offense is kind of like biology class … it’s so hard,” said Gansey. “Having a whole year is really going to help.”
Gansey expects to graduate next spring and will have a leg up on a master’s degree before his playing career is finished at WVU.
In the short time he’s been here, Gansey says his biggest adjustment has been getting used to the size of the WVU campus, “The first few weeks here I was like, ‘Geez this place is huge. I don’t know how I’m going to do this?’ Now the size doesn’t faze me. There are a lot of good people here and I really like it.”
Gansey’s biggest class at St. Bonaventure had about 20 people in it. At WVU, he has had some classes with as many as 250 students.
He is also getting used to not playing this year. His role is to get the regulars prepared while playing on the scout team.
“In practice it’s kind of tough because when they do five-on-five stuff I’m kind of the odd-man out. Obviously he’s got to play the guys who are going to play this year so it’s difficult for me to watch from the sidelines,” he said.
In addition to getting ahead academically, Gansey’s wants to take this year to work on the finer points in his game.
“Going against the first team everyday is going to help my game,” he said.
And while Mike Gansey is one of the more athletic players on the WVU team, don’t expect him to play the post nest year like he sometimes did at St. Bonaventure.
“With Kevin (Pittsnogle)and D’or (Fischer), I won’t have to do that here,” he laughed.
West Virginia, off this week due to final examinations, resumes action this Saturday against Duquesne at the WVU Coliseum. Tip off is set for 7 pm.
