National junior college player of the year Kristina King couldn’t have picked a better coach for whom to play than West Virginia University’s Mike Carey.

 

King, a 6-foot-3-inch forward from Mebane, North Carolina, who most recently played at Gulf Coast State College, just oozes with potential.

 

That’s what Duke saw in her, NC State and Virginia Tech, too.

 

That’s also what the Big 12 coaches see in her, the group recently selecting King as the league’s preseason newcomer of the year.

 

“It feels good,” King said of her most recent honor. “I feel like if I listen to what coach Carey says and get it all down and push myself I will be where I need to be when the season starts. I’m kind of excited about it.”

 

Carey got a commitment from King out of high school, and then had to re-recruit her when she blew up at Gulf Coast State - one of the top junior college women’s programs in the country.

 

King averaged 19.1 points and 8.8 rebounds per game last winter in leading the Commodores to a 32-1 record and a national championship - the school’s fourth under veteran coach Roonie Scovel.

 

In the junior college national tournament, King averaged 20.7 points, 9.3 rebounds and 2.5 blocks per game, including a double-double with 13 points and 13 rebounds in the national championship game against Trinity Valley.

 

That’s when she became the No. 1-rated junior college recruit in the country.

 

“Everybody was trying to get her,” Carey recalled last week. “When you sign them out of high school then teams know who they have to go against. We were the target of everybody trying to recruit her and we were able to get her back.”

 

According to King, despite growing up in Tar Heel country, the Mountaineers were always No. 1 on her list, going all the way back to her freshman year in high school.

 

“My relationship with the coaches, we just clicked,” she said. “When I came on my visits and my unofficial visits to the camps it just felt like a family here. This is where I belonged.”

 

As more schools began recruiting her, and after each place she visited, she always caught herself comparing those experiences to WVU.

 

That’s when she realized Morgantown is where she was supposed to be.

 

“This time around it was easier to tell them no rather than the first time when I was trying to talk to a whole bunch of people,” she said. “I felt like loyalty was big with West Virginia.”

 

Still, there was a lot of pull for her to stay home and go to Duke, which is undergoing a bit of a transition this season under ninth-year coach Joanne McCallie.

 

The Blue Devils had a run of 17 straight top-10 finishes under McCallie and former coach Gail Goestenkors before leveling off with a 20-12 record last year. As a result, McCallie was looking for some immediate help to rebuild her roster and that’s what she was selling to King.

 

At West Virginia, King was not needed immediately because of the strong core of players Carey has returning from last year’s team that won 25 games and lost in the second round of the NCAA tournament against Ohio State.

 

King had seen enough Mountaineer games on TV to realize this.

 

“It’s better when you have four, five or even eight people who can score,” she said. “When I was in junior college it was, ‘Oh, I’ve got to do this. I’ve got to make the next play. I’ve got to score.’ Now we can rely on each other and everybody is accountable for what they do.” 

 

In the end, it came down to a matter of where King felt she could grow more as a player and that’s where Carey’s long track record of developing players was most appealing.

 

She saw what Carey had done with budding WNBA star Bria Holmes, what he did with Asya Bussie, Olayinka Sanni and some of the other similar-type players he has developed.

 

King said she liked that he places such a big emphasis on defense and also appreciated the fact that he painted a realistic picture of what she needs to do to become a better basketball player.

 

“He pushes you and he emphasizes defense,” she said. “Defense creates offense and that’s how I’ve always played. My defense always made my offense getting blocked shots and just the way they play made me seem like I fit in.”

 

Carey indicated that King’s athletic ability and speed is already where it needs to be, but she still has a lot of work to do on the defensive end of the floor.

 

“She can run,” he said. “She can get up and down the floor with our guards. Now we’ve got to really work the other stuff in there but like I told Kristina, ‘As long as you go hard and you don’t stop when you make a mistake then you are going to continue to get better.’”

 

“Coach Carey has been telling me ever since he started recruiting me if there is a slow five on me it’s easy to go by them,” King said. “If they’re slow they can’t guard me. If there is a guard on me then normally I’m longer so I can score over them. Either way, it’s kind of hard to guard me - I’ve just got to get stronger.”

 

Senior center Lanay Montgomery agrees.

 

“She still has a lot of learning to do just from the adjustment coming from juco, but she’s very athletic and we’ve always kind of had a four that can run the floor and she’s definitely that person,” Montgomery said. “She just has to work on the defensive side of the game and being more physical because she will play against bigger players, or she will maybe have to guard a five and it’s a lot more physical in the Big 12.”

 

King admitted being more physical around the basket is a part of her game that remains a work in progress.

 

“I really don’t like contact so that’s something I have to get better at,” she said. “In the Big 12 there is going to be contact so I have to get used to it. I’m working on that right now.”

 

When that happens, and when she gets comfortable playing defense the way Carey wants her to play it, King will become a valuable asset to the team because she is quick enough and athletic enough to switch one through four defensively. That’s pretty rare.

 

Carey said that could happen sometime this year or it may take a little bit longer based on the experiences he’s had with junior college players.

 

“The ones that have really been successful for us have been here three years, or maybe came here and got injured and redshirted and had another year to learn our system,” he noted. “The way we do things, especially on the defensive side, it takes them a year to learn and their senior year they’re ready to go.

 

“When I was on the men’s side and I had a lot of junior college players, I knew they were only going to give me what I needed one year because it was going to take them that long to adjust to me, to adjust to what we do in our style,” he continued. “Kristina King is coming in here with all that hype, but she has a lot to learn.

 

“As long as she goes hard and continues to work, she will get better,” he concluded.

 

Based on Carey’s track record of developing players, there is ample proof that it will happen once again with Kristina King.

 

When that happens is up to Kristina King.