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Campus Connection: Change A Constant With Huggs
December 15, 2016 10:17 AM | Men's Basketball
You wouldn’t know it by the way he operates on the court during basketball games, but one of Bob Huggins’ best characteristics is his flexibility.
Bob Huggins and flexibility in the same sentence?
Really?
But how else can you explain his phenomenal success?
When Huggins started at Walsh College in 1980 there was no shot clock, no 3-point arc and defense was played at an arm’s-length distance from the person with the basketball.
He won then, and he has continued to win through the years.
Why?
How?
Because Huggins has always stayed one step ahead of the game.
“He always tells me the way you start out as a coach is not the way you are going to end as a coach,” said WVU assistant coach Erik Martin, who played for Huggins on his first Final Four team at Cincinnati in 1992. “You’ve got to change with the times. Some of that is because Huggs is a genius intelligence-wise and also because Huggs has always had good guys around him - good assistants who have always kind of had their hand on the pulse of what’s going on.”
Ole Miss coach Andy Kennedy, who was with Huggins for four years at Cincinnati, said change has been the one constant with Huggins during his 35-year coaching career.
His teams played a certain way at Walsh. They played a little bit differently at Akron and then changed some more when he got to Cincinnati and got better players.
His style changed again when he coached at Kansas State and then he adapted further when he got to West Virginia.
“He changed the Cincinnati culture and took them to the Final Four by pressing and running,” Kennedy said. “He then changed his style of play when he had Danny Fortson and really played inside-out the years I was there with him. Then when he had Steve Logan, who was the runner-up to Jay Williams for the Wooden Player of the Year, he played through his guards.
“Now, he’s turned West Virginia into ‘Press Virginia’ based on his personnel and this just speaks to his abilities as a coach,” said Kennedy. “He’s one of the all-time greats of his era.”
Before his latest makeover, Huggins once took a WVU team to the Final Four playing John Beilein’s 1-3-1 zone defense that he learned from Beilein’s players.
Think about that. Huggins didn’t come in and force the players he inherited from a very good basketball coach to play exactly the way he wanted them to play because he knew it wasn’t going to work.
They were recruited to play a different style and he realized immediately that the way his Cincinnati teams played was simply not going to work when he first got here.
“I want to win,” Huggins said recently. “My dad retired very young for a coach and I think he won 87 percent of his games. He said he wasn’t really excited about the wins and the losses were just so excruciating and so painful and you’re sitting there saying to yourself, why am I doing this? I never wanted to be like that.”
“No ego,” assistant coach Larry Harrison said. “When we got here he took some of the stuff Beilein taught these guys that they were comfortable with and we kept that because that’s what the guys knew and then we sprinkled in some of the things we wanted. That’s great coaching there.”
“I was around at the beginning of this creation because I was at Ohio University in the early 80s when Bob took over at Walsh,” ESPN college basketball analyst Fran Fraschilla recalled. “That was the first time I got to know him and watch him coach and all these many years later I’m watching what is going to turn out to be a hall of fame career.
“A good friend of mine says not everybody plays the same golf course and it’s true in Bob’s case,” Fraschilla added.
Assistant coach Ron Everhart thought he was a pretty good basketball coach when he got the opportunity to join Huggins’ WVU staff in 2012. But what he thought he knew was not quite as much as he’s learned in the four years he’s sat next to Huggins during games.
“I’ve kind of turned all the way around to the way he sees things,” Everhart said. “For example, you say, ‘Hey Huggs, why don’t you look at running A, B or C?’ ‘Okay, that’s good but who is going to pass the ball? Who is going to make the delivery?’ For a lot of my career I never thought about that. I just thought, ‘Man, let’s just make sure everyone is a good passer.’ Well it doesn’t work that way at this level.”
South Carolina coach Frank Martin, who worked with Huggins at Cincinnati and then briefly at Kansas State, marvels at what Huggins has been able to do at the places he’s been - not exactly blue blood schools.
Walsh, Akron, Cincinnati, Kansas State and West Virginia are not places where McDonalds All-Americans are lining up to play.
The ones he’s gotten came at Cincinnati once he got that program rolling in the late 1990s.
“He’s the most underrated great coach in the country,” Frank Martin said. “The media doesn’t care for him so therefore they don’t applaud him. Look at the places he’s won. The style of play has changed at every school because he can adapt to the kids he can recruit at the school he’s at.
“He wins with his players; he takes over at other schools like he did at K-State and West Virginia and wins with other people’s players. He is the truest man I’ve met in college basketball,” Martin said.
“You want to be around him. He’s smart. He’s genuine. He’s honest. He’s loyal and he doesn’t sugar-coat things to make you happy,” Martin added. “He tells you the truth and at the end of the day, all of us that are hoping to succeed are always searching for the truth and Huggs always gives it to you.”
Billy Hahn, who has known Huggins since the two were college players back in the early 1970s, has been around three great college coaches during his long career - Lefty Driesell, Gary Williams and Bob Huggins.
Hahn said all three have one primary thing in common - a passion to win.
“That means they are going to bring it to practice every day, and they expect their players to be at the top of their game every minute of every practice,” Hahn said. “They demand guys working hard and guys being the best that they can be. That’s what has made all three of them so special. Successful people do things that aren’t always fun to do and that’s why they are successful because they do the hard, tough, roll-up-your-sleeves stuff every day.”
Those are things worth keeping in mind on the eve of Bob Huggins’ 800th career victory, which could happen as early as Saturday afternoon when West Virginia faces UMKC at 2 p.m. at the WVU Coliseum.
Whenever it happens, he will become one of just 10 Division I coaches in NCAA history to do so (82-year-old Rollie Massimino got his 800th win Wednesday night for Keiser University).
Huggins has gotten there because he’s not the same basketball coach he was when he started at Walsh College 35 years ago.
And five years from now, there is a good chance he won’t be the same coach then either.
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