Dr. Holgorsen's WVU Team Chemistry Just Right
July 19, 2017 03:23 PM | Football
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - It’s difficult to put a value on the closeness and togetherness of a college football team, but it’s safe to assume those two important traits played a key role in West Virginia’s outstanding 10-3 record last season.
Does a selfish and inconsiderate football team hold on to beat BYU over in Landover, Maryland, last year?
Does a selfish and inconsiderate football team come back from two scores down in the fourth quarter to defeat Kansas State a week later?
Does a selfish and inconsiderate football team pull together and outlast Texas in Austin, or come back to beat Baylor on Senior Day?
Of course not.
In the eyes of many, having a close football team full of players who generally enjoy being around each other is probably one of the least appreciated aspects of developing a winning football program.
But to coaches - particularly the really good ones - having the right team chemistry is nearly as important as having a roster full of four- and five-star football players.
Dana Holgorsen is frequently credited for his cutting-edge offensive tactics and his uncanny ability of finding creative ways to get his best players the football, but you rarely ever read or hear about the family-type atmosphere he’s cultivated inside the Milan Puskar Center.
Populating his football program with good people is just as important to him as having a roster full of good football players.
And it started the moment he arrived on campus back in the winter of 2011. He put a map of Morgantown on the wall in the team meeting room and placed pins where every player on the team lived.
Holgorsen, recalling this five years later, used his index finger to point to many different places on the table in front of him to illustrate all of the different places in town where his players lived.
West Virginia players show off their socks during Tuesday's Big 12 Media Day at the Ford Center in Frisco, Texas. Maggie Matella photo.
“It was everywhere,” he said. “I had guys living five miles out here who didn’t have a car and couldn’t go to class. So, we came up with a housing policy. You are going to live within this area of the stadium, which means a lot of our guys lived together and they didn’t live together before. I think that made a huge impact on what we’re doing.”
Typically, the closest football teams are often the ones with large senior classes full of players with four or five years of shared experiences.
But if you look at Holgorsen’s West Virginia rosters, particularly the last three or four years, you will notice a large number of transfers, both two-year and four-year transfer players.
His team is also made up players from many different places - rural, urban, suburban … you name it.
So, how does West Virginia do it? How are the Mountaineers able to develop close football teams committed to a common cause?
It’s simple: Dana Holgorsen.
“Dana, (strength coach) Mike Joseph and their guys have really instilled in our minds that we’re family and when you’ve got newcomers coming in some people don’t want to accept them, but we do a good job here of accepting them and making them part of our family,” senior fullback Elijah Wellman said. “Our best friends are the people we’re around every day so we’ve kind of taken them in and made them a part of our family automatically.”
Senior linebacker Al-Rasheed Benton, from Newark, New Jersey, believes the accepting culture here in West Virginia goes a long way in making outsiders immediately comfortably.
He explains.
“One thing about the state of West Virginia, everybody is accepted - everybody loves you and everybody brings you into the culture and that’s why a lot of guys come here,” he said. “You don’t get this at a lot of places.”
Holgorsen says a lot of things go into having a family-oriented football program. He’s got some program stability now with a new five-year contract that demonstrates to potential players (and assistant coaches) that he’s here for the long haul.
He’s got assistant coaches and support personnel who do a great job of vetting prospects to make sure the players they are bringing on campus belong on campus.
“Recruiting good kids is a big aspect of it,” Holgorsen noted. “We’ve acted right for the most part. We had the best academic semester we’ve ever had because our kids genuinely like being here and if they walk through the building and they like it, they’re probably going to work hard at it.”
He’s also willing to remove the bad apples who can spoil the entire basket.
“You’ve got to pay particular attention to who they are and don’t be scared to get rid of one if you have to,” Holgorsen said.
According to Benton, there is another shared factor that plays a role in bringing together Dana Holgorsen’s West Virginia football teams - a general lack of respect for anything West Virginia.
Of course, this general lack of respect predates Holgorsen, spanning nearly the entire 125-year history of Mountaineer football going back to the program’s inception.
Holgorsen, like many of the other successful coaches here in the past, has wisely tapped into this with his players.
“If you look down the line on our team we’ve got a lot of good players and nobody gives them the respect that they deserve,” Benton said. “That’s the one thing that bonds everyone together here. When we’re working out it’s like, ‘Yeah, I know what you want and you know what I want, so now let’s go get it.’”
Now that Holgorsen’s way of doing things has been in place for six years, everyone involved with his program is on the same page.
“There are no surprises for the guys when they come into the building,” he said. “They know what to expect.”
"The pride of every Mountaineer" #HailWV #Big12FB pic.twitter.com/S43xGKC4ci
— WVU Football (@WVUfootball) July 18, 2017
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