Bahamas Trip Has Many Benefits
August 03, 2015 11:54 AM | Men's Basketball
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - It’s pretty safe to say two years ago Bob Huggins wouldn’t be taking a trip to the Bahamas with his basketball team.
He had a dysfunctional group in 2013 that lost 19 of 32 games, finished near the bottom of the Big 12 standings and left him with a perpetual scowl on his face.
“The worst year of my career,” Huggins admitted last week. “It’s not a lot of fun whatever you do if you’re not around a lot of people who aren’t enthusiastic or they do things grudgingly.”
Building successful college basketball teams can be a tricky thing because coaches are not dealing with a lot of players, meaning one or two guys not buying into the plan can mess up the entire operation. When that happens over the course of a season, the problems are only amplified because the guys are around each other so much.
Think back to more than a decade ago when John Beilein came to West Virginia and immediately turned the roster over with players he felt fit his culture and his way of doing things. Two years later he had a team good enough to reach the Elite Eight.
Huggins has also been extremely successful through the years at team building, beginning when he was at Walsh and continuing at Akron, Cincinnati, Kansas State, and now, West Virginia. When he got to WVU in 2007 Huggins modified his approach a little bit to suit the players he inherited from Beilein, adding a few key pieces here and there, and the result was a trip to the Final Four in 2010.
Then came 2013, when some of the pieces no longer fit what he wanted to do, for whatever reasons.
“We took some guys we thought were talented guys and we thought we could get them to play hard and they didn’t,” said Huggins. “People play basketball for a lot of reasons. The reasons most important to me are guys who love playing – who love being in the gym. Those guys are easy to get to play hard.”
And guys Huggins loves being around.
“They say gym rats, we’ve got guys that love being in the gym so when they do that obviously they are going to play harder,” he explained. “And I think the culture of the press – everybody knew they were going to be involved.”
Last year, Huggins decided to shake things up and implement a full-court press that required using a bunch of different guys. Ten different players averaged at least 13 minutes per game as the substitutions sometimes came in waves, almost like a line change in hockey.
What came of it was a 25-win season and another trip to the NCAA tournament Sweet 16 for Huggins.
“Maybe one of the best benefits of playing the way we played a year ago is that everybody plays,” he pointed out. “I think people have a tendency of being a little more vested when they know they are going to be a part of it.”
Today, Huggins has a roster full of his guys – guys willing to work hard and put in the time to become better basketball players. Consequently, that constant scowl we used to see from Huggins off the court has once again been replaced with a smile.
“This is a fun bunch,” he said. “They enjoy being around each other. That part of it has been really good. We’ve had bowling nights and it’s more for the young guys because the older guys are really pretty good and they get along great.”
Huggins plans on doing a little team building next week when the Mountaineers take off for a six-day trip to the Bahamas. They will get 10 practices here in Morgantown before leaving to play three games down in the Caribbean. The team will also get in some additional practices and game prep down there as well.
“The camaraderie part of it, particularly with the new guys … and we’re going to be able to get some other guys to play more,” noted Huggins of some of the benefits of taking his team down to the Bahamas.
Several key components from last year’s team are returning, including junior forward Devin Williams, who averaged 11.6 points and 8.1 rebounds per game last season and played extremely well in the NCAA tournament.
Nearly 75 percent of the team’s offense is back from last year, providing a solid base from which Huggins can build. Then there is an interesting group of newcomers headlined by Shaker Heights, Ohio, forward Esa Ahmad, considered one of the best prep players in the Buckeye State last winter.
“Their heads are spinning and it’s like that every year,” Huggins said of his freshmen. “There is a lot of stuff to take in. The speed of the game, everything happens so much faster than it did in high school. They were quicker, faster, stronger than anybody that they played against and now that’s not the case.”
The practices these guys get together getting ready for the trip will likely turn out to be more valuable than the games the team plays down in the Bahamas, Huggins said.
“I think it’s really helped our freshmen,” he explained. “It will give them an idea of what’s coming and kind of familiarize them with what we do and the way we do things.”
Which is play hard, do things enthusiastically and do them the right way – the Bob Huggins way of doing things.
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