MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - Thirty four years ago, a young guy with the right basketball connections was beginning his coaching career at Walsh College in North Canton, Ohio.
Today, his combed-back hair is beginning to gray, he’s got a new hip and the walk out to the bench may be a little slower than it once was, but make no mistake about it, the fire still burns as brightly as ever for Bob Huggins.
He still puts in the same amount of time he did when he was in his 20s trying to make a name for himself in a very unforgiving business.
“I’ve been around the game my whole life, it’s sort of second nature,” Huggins said yesterday on the eve of tonight’s season opener against Northern Kentucky. “I enjoy it. These guys are fun to be around, they’re fun to coach.”
The son of a coach, basketball was No. 1, No. 2, No. 3 and probably No. 25 on the list of priorities for Huggins growing up Port Washington, Ohio, when his father, Charlie Huggins, finally pulled up the parking brake on his coaching career at Indian Valley South High.
It was there where Charlie became one of the great coaches in Ohio prep basketball history, and it was there were Huggins got his Ph.D.-level training in the game at such an early age.
“It’s crazy how things end up,” he said. “I bounced around and ended up in this little town, Port Washington, which is five miles from Gnadenhutten where (former Ohio State coach) Eldon Miller grew up one way, and five miles the other way is Newcomerstown where Woody Hayes grew up and his dad was superintendent of schools and the whole thing.
“So, going to Ohio State (following a year as a graduate assistant coach at West Virginia for Joedy Gardner) the first guy to come in and see me was Woody. You are kind of taken aback that you are able to be around, rub shoulders and learn from those guys. It was a great experience.”
That great experience has led to even more great experiences during a remarkable coaching career that will one day rank among the best in college basketball history.
Huggins, just 62, is already 13th on the Division I all-time victory list with 765 heading into this season, meaning he’s going to pass Lou Henson (779), Lute Olsen (780) and probably Lefty Driesell (786) to move into the top 10 coaches of all-time by the end of this year.
The only three moving targets ahead of Huggins are Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim and Coastal Carolina’s Cliff Ellis.
Huggins has produced 24 20-win seasons, which are the ninth-most in NCAA history, and he’s already coached in 1,077 career games, more than such guys as Adolph Rupp, John Wooden, Lute Olson, John Chaney, Gary Williams, Norm Sloan and Gene Bartow – some of the biggest names ever in the profession.
If he can maintain his career average of 23 wins per season for the next eight years when he turns 70 (Krzyzewski is 68 and is still going strong and Boeheim is still at it at 70) - and all indications are he will – that would put him very close to 1,000 career victories, something only Krzyzewski has so far been able to achieve.
Furthermore, Huggins’ 765 wins have come at Walsh, Akron, Cincinnati, Kansas State and West Virginia – all good places to coach, but not schools where you can just go out and pick the guys you want to come and play for you.
You have to work it and Huggins has worked it harder than anybody, going all the way back to his days as a young assistant coach at Ohio State on Miller’s staff in the late 1970s.
“Starting here and then getting the opportunity to go to Ohio State was a huge deal,” Huggins said. “Eldon Miller was one of the great guys of all-time. He’s one of the great people I’ve ever been around in my life, and I learned a lot of things from him. I was on the road five, six days a week so it helped me with contacts in areas outside of Ohio. I spent a lot of time in New York, Michigan and other places.”
Those contacts led to his first job at Walsh in 1980 where he learned how to coach on his feet. Incidentally, that expression - coaching on your feet, which I first heard John Chaney mention many years ago - is really the secret to what separates the good ones from the great ones.
“I went to Walsh and that was a great experience,” said Huggins. “I told Dana (Holgorsen) the first year he was here when he asked me, ‘Was it really hard your first year?’ I said, ‘Dana, there were 38 people in the stands for my first game. I know because I counted them. You’ve got 60,000 or whatever it is. It’s a whole lot different.’ I made a lot of mistakes, but nobody saw them.”
Huggins had the benefit of being close to his dad so he could bounce ideas off of him and bring him over to practice to get an expert opinion on his personnel and the things that he was doing – right and wrong.
Then, eventually, after three successful years at Walsh, Huggins felt the need to spread his wings and become more marketable as a Division I coach so he decided to take an assistant coaching job at Central Florida in 1984.
“Worst decision I’ve made,” said Huggins. “I didn’t like it there. They didn’t care about basketball and it was a really different culture there and I got out as fast as I could.”
Huggins returned to his Ohio roots at Akron in 1985 where the new president there once served on the board of trustees at Walsh, knew about Huggins and watched his teams play.
“That’s how you go from being an assistant at Central Florida to the Akron job,” Huggins explained.
During his second season at Akron he got the Zips to the NCAA tournament in 1986 when they lost a tight first-round game to Michigan. Three years later, Huggins took over at Cincinnati to revive a once-proud Bearcat basketball tradition that had fallen on tough times.
“I loved Cincinnati,” he said. “What a great town. A great town to live and raise a family. And we were good. We had a heck of a run.”
Huggins’ first trip to the NCAA tournament with the Bearcats in 1992 went all the way to the Final Four in Minneapolis where they lost by four to Michigan, 76-72.
Five years later, Huggins’ 1997 Cincinnati team began the year ranked No. 1 in the country and his best team in 2000 spent most of the season No. 1 in the polls until national player of the year Kenyon Martin broke his leg in the waning minutes of the Conference USA tournament quarterfinals against St. Louis.
That was the team that was going to get Huggins his first national championship.
“The most fun I ever had was 2000 before Kenyon broke his leg,” he said. “I can remember playing Iowa State, and they’re good – a top 10 team in the country - and we’re up 12 or so and they score a couple of baskets and it gets to eight and my assistant said, ‘Huggs, you’ve got to run something.’
“So I stood up and said, ‘Throw it to Kenyon!’ We throw it to him and he dunks it. We throw it to him the next time and he kicks it out to DerMarr Johnson and we get a three. Then we throw it to him again and they try and double with their power forward and he throws it out and Ryan Fletcher hits a three and I turn around to my assistant and I said, ‘How do you like that play?’
“That’s why I’ve coached 34 years – throw it to the good guys, and keep (the bad players) on the other side (of the scorer’s table),” said Huggins.
When his tenure at UC ran its course in 2005, a 25-8 season that ended with a competitive loss to Kentucky in the second round of the NCAA tournament, Huggins took a year off in 2006 to recharge his battery.
But it didn’t take him long to get another really good job.
“Honestly, I really didn’t want to go to Kansas State to start with, but they kept talking to me and the more they talked to me the more it seemed like West Virginia and West Virginia people,” said Huggins. “They talked me into going. I actually had an NBA opportunity the year I was off and I didn’t want to go that route. I’d already had those opportunities and I just didn’t want to do it.”
One year at Kansas State opened the door to return to WVU in the spring of 2007 when John Beilein left to take the Michigan job.
“It was hard leaving Kansas State because those people are just like the people here,” Huggins admitted. “It’s an unbelievable basketball state. Unless you’re there, you never realize what a great basketball state it is so that was hard.”
Now, nine years later, Huggins already has the third-longest tenure of any Mountaineer coach, trailing only Gale Catlett and Francis Stadsvold.
He’s taken six teams to the NCAA tournament, two to the Sweet 16, one to the Elite Eight and one to the Final Four. Four of them have ended the season ranked in the top 25, including last year’s team that finished 20th in the Associated Press poll with 25 victories, and he’s done this against the most difficult schedules any West Virginia coach has ever faced.
“I can’t believe I’ve been here for nine years,” Huggins said. “Every time someone says ‘it’s your ninth year’ I have to start thinking, ‘Wow, I’ve been here that long?’ It doesn’t seem like it. For the most part, other than that one year, it’s been very enjoyable.”
Enjoyable for Huggins, and even more enjoyable for Mountaineer basketball fans accustomed to watching winning basketball.
And, another year of winning basketball with Bob Huggins is about to get underway tonight.
