Huggins Returns to Hoops Roots
March 17, 2015 01:33 PM | General
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| West Virginia coach Bob Huggins, pictured here during last Thursday's Big 12 tournament game against Baylor, is returning to his Buckeye State basketball roots this weekend in Columbus. | |
| Big 12 Conference photo |
It was in Ohio where Huggins first made a name for himself playing for his father at Indian Valley South; it was in Ohio where he began to really understand the game; it was in Ohio where he got his first head coaching job and it was in Ohio where he became nationally known while coaching at Cincinnati.
There isn’t a great Ohio player or coach over the last 50 years that Huggins either doesn’t know or know about. The two best players on this year’s team are from Ohio, and his best recruit signed for next year also happens to be one of the top players in the state.
His stories about Ohio basketball are endless. I know because I’ve heard a lot of them.
Later this week, Huggins will return to his basketball roots when his fifth-seeded Mountaineers face No. 12-seed Buffalo at Nationwide Arena in Columbus in an NCAA tournament second round game.
Four paragraphs down from the lead in Sunday’s online version of the Columbus Dispatch announcing the teams playing in the Discovery City this weekend was mention of Huggins’ return to Ohio and the compelling storyline it presents.
So naturally, Huggins’ Sunday evening remarks were tinged with Buckeye State nostalgia - even though no reporter specifically asked him about returning to his hoop roots.
He was asked about preparing for an unfamiliar opponent such as Buffalo and how difficult it used to be in the days before DVRs getting intelligence on another team. That prompted a story about his first NCAA tournament appearance at Cincinnati in 1992.
“My assistant, who did all of the scouting back then, was a guy named John Loyer, who was the head coach of the (Detroit) Pistons last year and John played for me,” Huggins began. “The first time we got in at Cincinnati and we’re at my house I’m like, ‘We’ve got to find some tape.’ (Loyer) said, ‘Huggs I’ve got it.’
“We broke down film then,” Huggins continued. “I saw this thing and I thought it was really neat. It was a two-deck VCR thing that you could tape games and stuff and I got it with my BP credit card. So John had that and he went out to his car, opened up his trunk. He had sat down and figured out who we were going to play. We played Delaware and then Michigan State, but he comes in with two tapes of Delaware.
“I’m like, ‘How did you do that?’ He said, ‘I just sat down and tried to figure out who it was we were going to play.’ It’s good to have smart assistants.”
Later, Huggins was asked to talk about his experiences learning the game from his father, legendary Ohio high school coach Charlie Huggins, and any similarities there may be with Buffalo coach Bobby Hurley, who also grew up around the game learning from New Jersey prep coaching legend Bob Hurley Sr.
“You spend a lot of time in the gym,” Huggins began. “I think their family was a lot like ours – mine. You grow up in a gym. My dad started the first overnight basketball camp in the state of Ohio. We pretty much had it year-round and I was always around the game.”
Huggins recalled running coaching stations alongside his father and Ed McClusky, a Western Pennslyvania prep coaching legend at Farrell High.
“Here I was just in high school when we first started and I am thinking, ‘What do these guys think (of him)?” he said.
Not totally satisfied that a link to the Hurley family was established, the questioner tried again to get Huggins to help connect the dots to the Hurleys.
More Bob Huggins Ohio Basketball 101 …
“In my case, because my dad was around so many coaches and because of the camp, I got a lot of different perspectives on a lot of different things,” he recalled.
It was on the asphalt outdoor courts at his father’s Eastern Ohio Basketball Camp in Sherrodsville where Huggins learned how to defend other teams.
“I went to Jim McDonald and he was a terrific defensive coach,” Huggins recalled. “He was a long-time assistant at Toledo and then he took the Kent State job and I can remember we’re standing on the outdoor courts at my dad’s camp and I go over and I said, ‘Coach, how do you guard the ball on the wing? Do you try and push it to the baseline?’ Coach (Eldon) Miller at Ohio State just wanted to try and play head-up, contain and keep him between you and the basket.”
McDonald grabbed a couple of campers who were shooting on the court, gave one of them the ball and then started pulling other players over to guard him … First one, and then two, then three and finally four.
“If this guy has the ball and I can get like this (puts two players on him) I feel better,” he began. “But, if I can get it like this (adding a third and fourth defender) then we can guard him now.”
His defensive lesson finished, McDonald walked away.
“I’m thinking to myself, here I am a young guy trying to learn and here he is trying to be a wise guy,” Huggins recalled. “Pretty much for the rest of the day I’m thinking to myself, what is he talking about?”
Then afterward it hit him: what McDonald was demonstrating was help defense.
“Later that night he said to me, ‘Did you understand what I told you?’ I said, “Yeah, you’re talking about getting people off the ball to the help line.’ He goes, ‘Yeah, we can’t guard people one-on-one – we’ve got to gang-guard them,’” Huggins recalled.
He continued.
“The point is, I was around so many different people with so many different ideas and I think the vast majority of what I do I learned from my dad, but there were a lot of other people who were very influential in the way I thought you were supposed to do things,” said Huggins.
Many of the things you will see in Columbus from Huggins’ West Virginia team on Friday afternoon are things that he first learned while growing up on those asphalt courts in Eastern Ohio.
Perhaps another story or two will follow this weekend.
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Thursday, April 16
Coach Pat Kirkland | April 15
Thursday, April 16
Coach Rich Rodriguez | April 15
Thursday, April 16
Alumni Series | Louisa Morgan Hoogduin
Wednesday, April 15
