Back to Work
October 17, 2005 12:02 PM | General
October 17, 2005
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – It has been a very busy off-season for West Virginia University basketball coach John Beilein. Such are the demands of celebrity following his team’s improbable NCAA tournament run that nearly wound up reaching the Final Four.
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| West Virginia coach John Beilein offers instruction during the team's first practice open to the public last Friday evening.
All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks |
If he wasn’t out chasing down prospects for this fall’s early signing period, he was working a clinic or making a speaking engagement. Beilein says it’s a necessary part of the job.
“It wasn’t something that I did to line my pockets,” he said last Friday evening. “We felt at this time it was a good idea to go out to display West Virginia basketball. I did clinics and a lot of motivational speaking just to do it.”
Beilein’s summer trips took him to Texas, Florida and Ohio.
“I spoke at clinics that I thought would be good for recruiting,” Beilein said. “I went to Texas, I went to Florida and I went to Cleveland and spoke with maybe 500-600 coaches for one reason: West Virginia basketball. It’s very important that when you’re hot that you get your name out there as a university.”
The Mountaineers have capitalized on their new-found celebrity in other ways, too. West Virginia will have the most regular season games televised nationally in school history with three to air on CBS alone. Season tickets are also going at a healthy pace with the Mountaineers presenting area basketball fans a home schedule that includes LSU, Notre Dame, Cincinnati, Connecticut, Louisville and Pitt.
West Virginia players and coaches have been inundated with speaking requests and letters of appreciation, too.
“I would guess we’ve signed 500 to 750 basketballs,” Beilein said. “The autographs are in the thousands. Emails and letters to me personally I think were about a thousand. I answered everyone in some way shape or form. It’s been demanding but what are you going to do? You’ve got to do that – those are good things to have.”
Beilein says it got to the point earlier this fall that he asked his players and coaches to scale back on some of the requests.
“Mike Gansey was asked to go and speak at a fifth-grade graduation and he got lost,” Beilein said. “We got a letter from them saying they were disappointed, well, he probably shouldn’t have been going to a fifth-grade graduation or whatever it was but he said yes. We told him, you don’t have to say yes to everything. You’re a student, too.”
Now with pre-season practice underway, Beilein has devoted all of his attention to his experienced basketball team that returns four starters from last year’s 24-11 season.
“We have five very good seniors,” Beilein said. “Their junior year was pretty darn good and I want them to understand why their junior year was so good. What you’ve got to do is take part of 2005 and never let them forget it as far as this is why it has happened.
“And then you’ve got to take 2005 and leave it there because every game we come to they know what you’ve accomplished and now you are the hunted,” Beilein said. “They’re not going to lie down and let you win. You’re really going to have to play well.”
Beilein says he’s happy with the work his players got in during the summer and were in pretty good shape when they came back for the fall semester.
“We ran our mile and I think the highest time was 5:43 and those were 6-11 kids running a 5:43,” he said. “We had a lot under 5:30 so they’re in pretty good shape. The preseason was different because we could actually work with six at a time so there were three practices where there were 12 people involved with it.”
In addition to finding replacements for graduated seniors Tyrone Sally and D’or Fischer, Beilein is also welcoming a new coach in Mike Maker, who replaces Jeff Neubauer.
“Mike Maker will be able to add a lot,” Beilein said. “I generally have hired people from outside my staff to get new ideas. Mike will tweak things a little bit.”
Yet at the same time with such a veteran team returning, Beilein doesn’t want to overdo it as a coaching staff.
“We don’t want to over coach,” he said. “That becomes a weakness and that includes me sometimes. I’d like to under coach this team if I could.”
The biggest adjustment, according to Beilein, will be working new players Rob Summers, Alex Ruoff and Joe Alexander into the rotation without upsetting the team chemistry.
Summers, a 7-foot center, has been inactive for 18 months after transferring from Penn State, while both Alex Ruoff and Joe Alexander are freshmen in the 6-foot-6 to 6-foot-8 range who played out on the wing in high school.
“The challenge is with Rob, Alex and Joe … where do they fit in because you want to move fast with the other guys with a game looming in 27 practice days,” Beilein said. “But you don’t want to go too fast that you lose your foundation.”
As for the newcomers Alexander, Ruoff and 6-foot-7-inch walk-on Josh Sowards, Beilein says they look like typical first-year players trying to understand his system.
“They’ve got the deer-in-the-headlights look sometimes,” he said. “One of those guys is going to have to help us out. We’ve got 10 guys out there and we play eight to nine.”
Note: The Mountaineer Ticket Office is accepting season-ticket orders for the 2005-06 men’s basketball season. You can order your season ticket by calling 1-800-WVU GAME. West Virginia’s first game is on Saturday, Nov. 12, at the WVU Coliseum against Louisiana-Monroe in the first game of the Guardians Classic. That contest will tip off at 3 pm.
