WVU Arrives
March 25, 2008 09:27 PM | General
March 25, 2008
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – The Sweet 16 may be nothing new to Bob Huggins, but he is making his first appearance in the round of 16 with his alma mater Thursday night when West Virginia takes on No. 3 seed Xavier at US Airways Center in Phoenix.
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| West Virginia players wait for their luggage to arrive at the team hotel in Phoenix.
All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks |
“I haven’t had much time to think about it,” Huggins said earlier this afternoon in Morgantown. “We are just trying to make sure we cover everything and give our guys a chance to win. I’m happy for (this team) - they have put a lot of work in and spent a lot of time.”
The Sweet 16 is nothing new to West Virginia’s players, either. WVU joins an elite list of schools including North Carolina, Kansas and Villanova that have made it to the Sweet 16 in three of the last four years. Veteran players like Darris Nichols, Alex Ruoff and Joe Alexander are tournament tested.
“Just playing in our league gives us an advantage,” Huggins said. “When you play in our league, every game is close; every game has a tournament atmosphere. I think playing the whole year against who we’ve played and when the league starts it has really helped us.”
Huggins is facing a Xavier team with an outstanding up-and-coming coach in Sean Miller, who West Virginia fans remember when Miller was a guard for Pitt in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
“One, they’ve got a helluva coach. Sean does a really good job coaching,” Huggins said. “They’re men. Look at those guys, they don’t have guys running around that aren’t men. They play eight guys and they are all big strong guys and they are very physical. I think that’s the difference in what Sean has done there. They are so physical now.”
Huggins and Miller go back to Huggins’ days coaching at Akron.
“My dad and John (Miller) used to work Coach (Edward) McCluskey’s camp (in Western Pennsylvania) together for a lot of years. John knows my dad very well,” Huggins said. “John coached my brother at the BC camp and Sean there doing a lot of dribbling things. I’ve known the Miller family for a long time.”
The two also share a common bond being sons of coaches.
“The time that he has spent in the gym and his dad is a great coach. His dad did an unbelievable job and was very fundamentally sound. Sean is the same way,” Huggins said. “You can’t spend as much time in the gym as what Sean spent in the gym with his father and being around the game and not understand what’s going on.”
Huggins says having past coaching experience in the NCAA Tournament really isn’t that big of a deal. It’s really more about the players.
“In 1992 everybody said, ‘This was great for your team, you’ll get in and get some experience and maybe next year you can make a run’ and we went to the Final Four,” Huggins said. “I was probably better before I had any experience. You just got to make shots at the right time and we’re going to be prepared; they are going to be prepared. When you get this far, you’re not going to run into somebody who’s not prepared.”
Huggins believes the most important thing is to not get too far ahead and to continue to treat this as a two-game mini-tournament.
“We’re worried about Xavier first. Then, we’ll deal with whatever comes after that,” Huggins said. “I think the guys are excited to play and we starting to shoot the ball a little bit better. Alex (Ruoff) is making some shots. Darris (Nichols) made some shots for us and I think Joe (Alexander) has been very consistent for us. We have just got to contain and make open shots.”
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