Building Blocks
March 21, 2006 12:43 AM | General
March 21, 2006
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – The modesty in John Beilein won’t allow him to admit that the basketball team he has constructed here at West Virginia University was part of some elaborate plan. He uses words like “good fortune” and “luck” when he talks about how he managed to piece together the five-player senior class that will take on Texas in the NCAA tournament round of 16 on Thursday night in Atlanta.
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| Kevin Pittsnogle was the shooting center John Beilein has always been after.
All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks |
This same core group of players led the Mountaineers to an “Elite Eight” appearance last year, taking the school to heights reached just one other time when the great Jerry West was making baskets at the old Field House down on Beechurst Avenue.
“I do think there was some luck involved,” Beilein admitted on Monday. “I think we were extremely fortunate to walk into a situation where they had recruited a shooting center.”
Beilein had tried unsuccessfully to recruit 6-foot-11-inch Kevin Pittsnogle while he was coaching at Richmond. While others watched a skinny post player with no inside game playing against so-so competition, Beilein saw the key ingredient to his unorthodox offense. eHarmony’s Dr. Neil Clark Warren couldn’t have made a better match.
“In my history as a coach at both Canisius and Richmond, and really at LeMoyne when I was a Division II coach, we found out how valuable a shooting center could be,” Beilein said. “I saw him on the AAU circuit the summer before his senior year when I was at the University of Richmond. We thought he was absolutely terrific and we tried to get in there but could never make any headway. He was a West Virginia kid and West Virginia had done a great job recruiting him.”
So when Beilein took the WVU job in April of 2002, the first trip he made was to the Pittsnogle house in Martinsburg to convince Kevin to stay on board. Once that was behind him, Beilein was then able to go out and fit in the rest of the pieces around his shooting center.
Beilein’s son Patrick was already going to play for him at Richmond with the provision that he would be awarded an academic scholarship and redshirt his first year. Of course those plans changed.
“Patrick was a fill in – a guy at the end of the year that we could trust and count on,” Beilein said.
The fill in has filled up the nets with 238 career 3-point field goals -- second-most in school history.
Beilein was also recruiting a pretty good German guard named Joe Herber. Like Patrick, the plan was to redshirt Herber his first year at Richmond. When Beilein switched schools, he telephoned Herber and told him he was going to Morgantown and asked if he would consider going there, too. Herber had never even heard of West Virginia.
Because the coach was still putting out fires and scrambling to piece together a team for the following season, Herber’s official visit to West Virginia was abrupt and without ceremony -- basically a shotgun wedding.
“Johannes, when he visited here it wasn’t a great situation when he came on campus,” Beilein chuckled.
Herber has started every single game of his Mountaineer career.
Beilein found out about guard J.D. Collins on the very last day coaches were allowed to be out on the road recruiting.
“I think it was the last day in April and (former assistant coach) Jeff Neubauer called me and he said, ‘I think I’ve found our guy.’ We were really looking for a solid leader-type to play guard,” Beilein said. “(Jeff) was actually at an AAU event and he heard about him from a coaching friend of mine.
“He had to go over to J.D.'s school to see an open gym that day; Jeff talked to him and was really impressed with the person he was getting – not just the player. J.D. came up for his visit and he decided to come here a week later,” Beilein said.
Collins wasn't remotely close to being a finished product when he came to West Virginia.
“While we were picky about teammates, we needed good people in here right away and we thought that he would be a guy that would fit but still needed to develop,” Beilein said.
It is hard to find a more dependable point guard playing college basketball right now. Collins has handed out more than twice as many assists as he's had turnovers for his career.
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| Beilein first became enamored with Mike Gansey while scouting Gansey's St. Bonaventure teams when he was still coaching at Richmond.
All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks |
The final piece to the puzzle came a year later when Beilein learned that 6-foot-4-inch forward Mike Gansey wanted to get out of the mess that had become of St. Bonaventure basketball. Beilein vividly recalls the first time he saw tape of Gansey while getting his Richmond team prepared to play the Bonnies.
“I still remember the drive on the left side when he went baseline,” Beilein said. “I don’t know who they were playing, but it was a very athletic team and they had some long 6-7 kids that could block shots and he just drove it and within a second he was on the other side of the rim laying it in.
“Everyone was looking around and saying, ‘How did that happen so quickly?’ I turned to my assistants after I watched them several times and I said, ‘These are the type of kids that if St. Bonaventure can get then we can do the same at Richmond.’”
Beilein admits it would have been a very difficult decision to take Gansey had he not seen him in person.
“That would have been a heck of a call in recruiting with that last scholarship that year had he been at, say, Toledo or Creighton and I had never seen him,” Beilein said.
What these five players have done in four years at West Virginia won’t easily be matched. They have beaten 15 nationally ranked teams over the course of four seasons, won 46 games the last two years playing in the best basketball league in America, and have turned into a walking infomercial for the school.
“We had a four-hour commercial on Jan. 2 and we’ll have a two-hour commercial coming up on Thursday night,” said football coach Rich Rodriguez, whose team defeated Georgia in the Sugar Bowl two months ago. “That’s pretty good exposure for little ‘ole WVU.”
West Virginia doesn’t have any McDonald’s All-Americans on its basketball team. No five-star recruits. Just an outstanding group of young men who have overcome whatever physical deficiencies they might have with an overabundance of heart and determination.
Fred Schaus, the man who took the 1959 team all the way to the NCAA finals and is still the measuring stick for all coaches at West Virginia University, built his teams the same way Beilein does today: by surrounding your stars with unselfish role players who place the good of the team ahead of themselves.
“Your great baseball players, your great football players or your great basketball players … everybody can recognize the great talent,” Schaus said last spring. “The ones that were difficult were the ones that you have to kind of take and hope that they develop.
“You’re looking at them as 17-18-year-old kids and your thinking when he gets to college he is going to get a lot stronger in a year or two and that makes a heck of a difference,” he said. “The role players … those are the ones that are difficult to judge and recruit or even try to recruit.”
Perhaps what Beilein has done isn’t simply a matter of luck after all, but rather a coach who has been in the business for 31 years and knows exactly the type of basketball teams he wants. If it's more than good fortune, he won't admit it.
“We’ve lucked out with all of them and they’ve just developed into not only one of the finest teams I’ve ever coached, but also one of the best I’ve ever been around,” he says.
