Campus Connection: The Pride of West Virginia!
September 05, 2014 11:49 AM | General
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| West Virginia offensive tackle Quinton Spain demonstrates his ups while celebrating Kevin White's touchdown reception against second-ranked Alabama during last weekend's game at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. | |
| All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks photo |
The theme that is developing for tomorrow’s Towson game is whether or not West Virginia can bottle up the great effort and determination it demonstrated against Alabama last Saturday and bring it once again against the Tigers.
Thinking of this reminded me of a story Don Nehlen used to tell about his first season working with Bo Schembechler at Michigan.
Nehlen coached the quarterbacks and during pregame warm-ups of his very first game with the Wolverines he got upset with star QB Rick Leach. Nehlen thought Leach and the rest of the Michigan offensive players were conducting their business in a manner too casual for his liking and were not in the right frame of mind heading into the game.
When the players got back into the locker room just before the national anthem, Nehlen ripped into Leach. He told him that the team they were playing was better than he thought and he better get his act together because he was the leader of the team.
Leach flashed a crooked smile and looked directly into the eyes of his new coach. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re Michigan. We don’t lose.”
Leach was right. And they didn’t.
The Wolverines rolled over the team they were playing that day and Nehlen learned a valuable lesson – good football teams ALWAYS expect to win. They prepare to win during the week and then they go out and win on the weekend.
The rah-rah stuff isn’t necessary to win football games and never lasts beyond the first few plays anyway.
Respect your opponent, yes, but respect the game even more. Tom Bradley spent 32 years coaching at Penn State with players who expected to win and respected the game.
“If you’re going to be a good football team you only get so many opportunities to play this game,” Bradley explained. “You can’t pick and choose. You can’t circle dates on a calendar.
“I don’t care what sport you play, if you’re not ready to go you are going to get beat,” he added. “If you want to be a good football team you’ve got to improve every day; you’ve got to improve every game. There are 12 opportunities to go fight and we lost one opportunity and now we have 11 to go.”
Last weekend, West Virginia was right there with the No. 2-ranked team in the country heading into the fourth quarter. The Mountaineers had two big opportunities to turn the tide on the Tide but they couldn’t finish the deal in those “critical situations” as coach Dana Holgorsen often mentions.
Offensive coordinator Shannon Dawson says the difference between the two teams out on the field last Saturday was one team expected to win while the other hoped to win.
“We’ve got to get to that,” Dawson said. “The only way you get to that is you have to have some success. A lot of these kids we’re playing with they’ve been close to success a lot of times but it hasn’t been there and it definitely hasn’t been there routinely. We’re closer on all three sides of the ball and as a team, but we’ve got to get to the point when we walk out there and we know.”
More questions will be answered about this football team on Saturday night if it goes out and plays with the same effort and determination as it did last Saturday on the big stage in front of a nationally televised audience.
If that happens this weekend, and beyond, then West Virginia’s performance against Alabama could be the start of something really special. The coaches here don’t talk to their players about being in games or simply competing against good teams, they talk about doing the things that are required to beat those good teams.
“If we wanted a moral victory and pats on the back then we accomplished our goal,” said Holgorsen. “But if we want to win a championship, which is what we talk about, then the determination needs to translate into a victory the next time you line up.
“What I sense – and we’ll find out on Saturday – is that this group is disappointed, but they have to put it behind them and are determined to move forward and work hard this week to put ourselves in position to win.”
“Everybody talks about the big things,” added Bradley. “But if you take care of the little things, those big things take care of themselves.”
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| Don Nehlen's finest coaching job at WVU might have been his team's 19-18 victory over Maryland seven days after the Mountaineers upset Oklahoma in Norman to begin the '82 season. | |
| All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks photo |
Speaking of Don Nehlen, the Hall of Fame coach has a long list of great victories at Bowling Green and West Virginia during his career, but perhaps his greatest coaching job occurred 32 years ago on Sept. 18, 1982 when his team beat Maryland 19-18 in a back-and-forth game.
If you recall, West Virginia was coming off the greatest upset victory in school history just seven days prior when the Mountaineers went out to Norman, Oklahoma and stunned ninth-ranked Oklahoma.
About 10,000 fans came out to the stadium to greet the team when they returned from Oklahoma and Morgantown literally shut down that week as students and fans celebrated the great win.
That Nehlen was able to rally his team and get them refocused to beat the Terps was a monumental achievement.
Be sure to check out the Mountaineer Flashback piece I did on that game for the Mountaineer Tailgate pregame show tomorrow afternoon prior to Saturday’s game broadcast on Mountaineer Sports Network from IMG affiliates throughout West Virginia. The Mountaineer Tailgate Show begins at 4 p.m.
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During his Tuesday afternoon news conference, Dana Holgorsen was asked to comment on the play of linebacker Xavier Preston, one of two true freshmen to see action during last Saturday’s game against Alabama. Holgorsen said Preston got a grand total of one snap against the Crimson Tide.
“He had one heck of a tackle,” noted Holgorsen. “It was just in the end zone so they counted it as a touchdown. It looked like he had good pop; he butted the guy up.”
This week, Holgorsen is looking for Preston to make some tackles in the field of play.
“He’s going to be a good player,” the coach noted.
As for West Virginia’s other true freshman, Dravon Henry, who saw lots of action against the Tide last Saturday, Holgorsen said it was a good beginning for the talented safety.
“He was a step slow at stuff,” said Holgorsen. “What I’m looking at is (Alabama safety Landon Collins), who is an All-American and a three-year starter. Watching him, he is quicker reaction wise. He’s got a little more pop.
“But the good news is what I look at from (Collins) is probably what we’re going to see out of (Henry) here in the near future.”
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Perhaps the biggest development to come out of last Saturday’s game wasn’t how well the West Virginia offense moved the football against Alabama’s defense, but rather the overall health of the team following the game against such a physical opponent.
Holgorsen said the Sunday injury report was about as clean as could be. “There is nobody in a green jersey that was not in a green jersey prior to the game,” he said.
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I got a phone call out of the blue a few weeks ago from a college roommate (who also happens to be a Director’s Club member in the MAC) asking me what is going on up here in Morgantown.
He said one of his co-workers was in town for a few days during the summer and he was absolutely stunned by what is happening in the city with all of the major construction projects going on everywhere.
The more I listened to him talk, the more I realized just how impressive things really are around here these days. All of those cranes that we see during our morning commute have just become part of our everyday scenery, I suppose.
It doesn’t matter where you live in the city – to the west near Interstate 79 where the University Town Centre is about to expand across the interstate, adding approximately 1,400 acres of development to the initial 60-or-70-acre parcel already completed; to the north near the hospitals where public and private development is booming; to the east near the airport where the new National Guard Readiness Center and a proposed 95-acre commerce park is planned next to I-68; beyond that into Cheat Lake where commercial developments are popping up everywhere; and to the south where the Morgantown Industrial Park continues to come alive - Morgantown is bursting at the seams.
In its Sept. 22, 2011 issue, the New York Times stated that Monongalia County had the largest increase in median household income in the nation during The Great Recession years between 2007 and 2010. Forbes recently named Morgantown “Best Small Places for Business and Careers” and the city has made Fortune’s list of the “Best Small Places to Launch a Small Business.” There are countless other national publications listing Morgantown among its best ofs as well.
Indeed, it is a remarkable time to be living in Monongalia County, and, yes, West Virginia University is a major catalyst for all of the great things happening around here.
North Central West Virginia and the Eastern Panhandle are the only two pockets of growth in the state right now, Morgantown alone generating roughly $1 billion in public and private development when you begin adding everything up.
How many U.S. cities the size of Morgantown can say that right now?
“It’s consistent,” said West Virginia State Senator Bob Beach. “It’s not just a spark here and then it dies off for a while. It’s a steady pace and that’s our economy right there that everybody wants to be a part of. It’s very exciting.”
What is going on in Morgantown is internally driven; more specifically, it’s happening because of the many great things going on at WVU.
“(Morgantown is) the employment center, the educational center and the healthcare center and we are beginning to develop into the retail center for a much larger region,” said Don Reinke, Director of the Monongalia County Development Authority and President of the Morgantown Area Economic Partnership. “That really kind of sets us apart from a lot of other communities. We are kind of an island of growth and prosperity (within the state).”
As I began to consider all of this a thought popped into my head: why has it taken so long for things to take off here?
Why didn’t this occur in the 1960s when the Evansdale campus was first expanding and major highways were being built?
Why didn’t it happen in the 1970s and 1980s?
In Morgantown you’ve got a major university located near several population centers, an improving highway system to reach those cities, roughly 5,000 highly skilled graduates entering the workforce each year and an extremely educated population base.
Why hasn’t Morgantown more closely resembled what has taken place up at State College, Pa. over the years? Or, why can’t I-79 from Clarksburg to Morgantown be West Virginia’s version of The Triangle?
Well the answers are complicated, for sure, and some of the obstacles that have hindered the region through the years are systemic. The late Charles Vest, West Virginia University graduate and former MIT president, writing the foreword in retired professor Ronald L. Lewis’ outstanding new history on West Virginia University, Aspiring to Greatness (a great read, by the way, and published by WVU Press), listed three strong “headwinds” that have hindered WVU in its quest for greatness through the years:
- The University has never had sufficient resources.
- The University has been a victim of “persistent and corrosive regionalism in West Virginia’s public attitudes, politics and media.”
- The University was constrained because of “constant and debilitating changes in its governance system and its relation to the state’s governors and legislatures.”
West Virginia University, wrote Lewis, missed a great opportunity for growth right after World War II when the federal government was funding “big science” projects at major universities throughout the country. This was a period of unprecedented advancement for many research institutions as Uncle Sam began entering into lucrative contracts with top universities.
WVU was never able to participate in this rapid acceleration in federally funded research because legal restrictions prohibited state agencies from accepting these projects unless they had adequate resources to finance them (the government then had a practice of funding research projects once they were completed).
In other words, because the University didn’t have the money to front many of its great ideas it lost the opportunity to capitalize on untold millions the federal government was pouring into the U.S. educational system to finance research on such things as defense, transportation, energy, medicine, and so forth during the Cold War.
I had no idea about this until West Virginia University Director of Athletics Oliver Luck gave me a quick history lesson one afternoon earlier this summer.
“Where did all of that money that should have gone to West Virginia University go?” Luck said. “It went to neighboring institutions such as Ohio State, Penn State, Virginia, Virginia Tech, Pitt and so forth. We lost out on a great opportunity there.”
Luck is keenly interested in what is happening with the local economy because it plays a huge role in how the West Virginia University athletic department will grow as it moves forward in the Big 12 Conference.
He saw firsthand how sports and commerce work hand-in-hand when he was chief executive officer of the Houston Sports Authority. It was during his tenure there that that the city was able to construct three world-class sporting venues – Minute Maid Park, Reliant Stadium and BBVA Compass Stadium.
Having a diverse and expanding local economy will be critical to what Luck wants to accomplish for WVU athletics, from attracting talented administrators, coaches and student-athletes to producing the top-flight teams that our loyal fans have come to expect on an annual basis.
Becoming a member of the Big 12 Conference has made this objective more challenging and there will be growing pains, for sure, just as there are growing pains going on in Morgantown right now as it transitions from a small town to a small city, but this transition is necessary … and inevitable.
“We’re so fortunate in that the county and the Morgantown metro area has just showed solid, continued growth in all the basic indicators of the economic health of any area, which includes job creation, income, rise in per-capita household income and population growth,” said Reinke. “At the same time our unemployment rate is almost always the lowest in the state and one of the lowest in the nation.”
Again, West Virginia University is a major reason why.
The athletic department is doing its part, too, from the new ballpark now under construction out at the University Town Centre to future projects coming down the line at Milan Puskar Stadium and the WVU Coliseum.
Presently, athletics is about to contribute $125 million worth of construction projects to the local economy, with several more undoubtedly percolating in Luck’s fertile mind.
Stay tuned.
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And finally, this is officially the 123rd season of Mountaineer football, after subtracting the Flu Year in 1918 when the team did not play and also the 1892 season when West Virginia took the year off after getting whacked over the head by Washington & Jefferson in 1891.
This season is also the 113th for the WVU marching band, which, of course, is today simply known as “The Pride of West Virginia.”
According to the Pride’s official website, the WVU marching band was formed in 1901 as an all-male ROTC group consisting of eight members.
It remained an all-male configuration until 1972 when WVU band director Don Wilcox encouraged women to join for the first time. During the early 1970s, the band performed at many prestigious events and gradually grew in national stature as one of America’s great collegiate marching bands.
It was during the 1975 Peach Bowl in Atlanta when the phrase “The Pride of West Virginia” was officially attached to the marching band. Prior to the inclusion of women, the WVU band was sometimes referred to as the “Marching 100,” according to longtime WVU alumni director Steve Douglas.
The phrase “Pride of West Virginia” caught on following the band’s pregame show at the ‘75 Peach Bowl when well-known Fulton County Stadium public address announcer Marshall Mann introduced West Virginia’s marching band as “The Pride of West Virginia!”
“That’s when we believe it happened when the public address announcer referenced the band as ‘The Pride of West Virginia,’” said current band director Jay Drury. “He was the guy who said it for the first time and it stuck.”
It sure did and has since become the appropriate signature catch phrase for one of the best marching bands in the country. Today, all West Virginians immediately recognize that phrase.
The late Frank “Doc” Stevens, West Virginia University’s longtime public address announcer, added his own spin to it by introducing the band this way during home football games at Mountaineer Field, “And now, from the College of Creative Arts on the campus of West Virginia University, the pride of West Virginia …”
Just thinking of this gives you goose flesh.
For those of you new to West Virginia University and Mountaineer football, do yourself a big favor and get to the stadium a little early to catch the Pride’s pregame show. I always make it a point each year during the home opener to stand down on the camera deck to take in the Pride’s performance.
It never fails to tug at the heart of this proud West Virginian!
Enjoy your weekend and we hope to see you out at the stadium for some Mountaineer football games this fall!
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