Photo by: All Pro Photography/Dale Sparks
Gansey's Two Great Years at WVU Hall of Fame Worthy
June 01, 2018 11:50 AM | Men's Basketball
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - The mid-2000s were a special time for West Virginia University sports.
The Mountaineer football team, under Rich Rodriguez, quarterback Pat White and tailback Steve Slaton, was thriving, achieving top 10-status for an unprecedented three straight years in 2005, 2006 and 2007.
The WVU men's basketball program also experienced a resurgence after John Beilein finally got things going when a guy named Mike Gansey decided to transfer in from St. Bonaventure.
WVU reached the NCAA Tournament Elite Eight during Gansey's first season with the Mountaineers in 2005 and made a return trip to the Sweet 16 during his senior season in 2006.
"It was a real fun time," Gansey said via cell phone from Los Angeles International Airport Wednesday afternoon. "We used to try and one-up the football team because they were so good at the time. I even had a couple of classes with Steve Slaton and we used to joke about it."
West Virginia has had plenty of basketball transfers through the years, some performing extremely well, but none made an impact quite like Gansey, a skinny, 6-foot-4-inch shooting guard from Olmsted Falls, Ohio.
When Beilein, coaching at Richmond, first saw Gansey play for the Bonnies he asked his assistant coaches why they couldn't recruit guys like him. When Gansey became available a year after Beilein took the West Virginia job, he pursued him like he was LeBron James.
At the time, Gansey said he was looking for a place where he could possibly play in the NCAA Tournament and after making a recruiting visit to Morgantown, the first of three he had scheduled at different schools, he canceled the others and committed to the Mountaineers.
"I was dead set on transferring and WVU was my first visit," Gansey recalled. "After leaving Morgantown, I realized something special was going on here and I wanted to be a part of it."
Fourteen years later, Gansey is joining White, Slaton and eight others in West Virginia University's 2018 Sports Hall of Fame class, announced last Sunday by Director of Athletics Shane Lyons.
This group, which also includes WVU's all-time leading rusher Avon Cobourne, two-time rifle national champion Web Wright, 1994 NCAA women's gymnastics coach of the year Bev Fry Plocki, professional football standouts Tom Keane and Larry Krutko, record-setting men's soccer goalkeeper Jon Capon, women's basketball standout Kate Bulger and 55-year WVU administrator Eleanor Lamb, is arguably the strongest hall of fame class since the inaugural one in 1991 that included Jerry West, Ira Errett Rodgers, Sam Huff, Joe Stydahar, Chuck Howley and others.
"I'm excited and honored to be recognized with such a great group of people," Gansey said. "I just can't believe it happened so quickly."
Gansey came to West Virginia shortly after the basketball program was reeling from a disastrous 2002 campaign that saw the Mountaineers lose 18 of their final 19 games and fail to make the Big East Tournament.
A 27-point loss in the final game ever played at Pitt's Fitzgerald Field House was one of the low points in the long, storied history of Mountaineer basketball. Then, after a week-long false start with Dan Dakich, Beilein was brought in to resurrect the program.
Two positive seasons in 2003 and 2004 set the stage for Gansey's Mountaineer debut against St. Peter's at the Coliseum on Nov. 20, 2004. He scored 16 points, handed out seven assists and grabbed four rebounds in WVU's 12-point victory over the Peacocks.
Things only got better from there.
Over the final month of the season, Gansey averaged 15.4 points, 5.9 rebounds and shot 62.5 percent from the floor to take West Virginia from the NCAA Tournament bubble to its first appearance in the Big Dance in seven years.
His unforgettable 22-point, 15-rebound performance in the Big East Tournament semifinals against Villanova included the game-winning free throws with just 0.2 seconds left on the clock.
"We beat Providence and Ryan Gomes three times that year and also beat Boston College in its last Big East game before going to the ACC just to get into the NCAA Tournament," he recalled.
In West Virginia's NCAA Tournament first-round victory over Creighton in Cleveland, Gansey played a vital role in the winning play at the end when he caught an outlet pass from Kevin Pittsnogle at midcourt and fired a perfect strike to a streaking Tyrone Sally for a slam dunk ahead of the buzzer.
Amazingly, the basketball never touched the floor on that perfectly executed play.
Two nights later, Gansey, playing in front of friends and family at the Wolstein Center, had one of the greatest individual performances ever by a Mountaineer player in the NCAA Tournament, scoring 29 points and grabbing eight rebounds to help WVU stun No. 2-seeded and fifth-ranked Wake Forest, 111-105, in double overtime.
Many believed that Wake Forest team, led by All-America guard Chris Paul and outstanding center Eric Williams, was destined to reach the Final Four until Gansey took over the game.
Gansey also played well in West Virginia's 65-60 victory over Texas Tech in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to reach the Elite Eight, where the Mountaineers fell in overtime to Louisville after leading the Cardinals by 20 points in the first half.
It was West Virginia's deepest run in the NCAA Tournament since Jerry West led the Mountaineers to the finals in 1959.
"The reason we won so many games is because we had the ultimate team chemistry," Gansey explained. "We weren't as talented as most of the teams we beat, but we had guys like Joe Herber who knew where everybody was supposed to go, great shooters like Kevin Pittsnogle, tough point guards like J.D. Collins and Darris Nichols, and we were in harmony with that 1-3-1 zone. I was the last straggler to come along and I was slow to learn all of the stuff."
It did take Gansey a while to pick up Beilein's unique system, which included such plays as "Double Quickie Potato," "Dirty Harry," "Best Play Ever," "Football" and "Bonnie," which came about as a result of Gansey constantly messing up one particular read.
"I ran the play wrong and ended up scoring anyway and he liked the variation off of it and ended up calling it for me," Gansey chuckled.
That was the beauty of Beilein's system - it was so adaptive to the players he had.
"Our team at West Virginia was unique," Gansey recalled. "We had to make five or six passes before we could take a shot; we had to play zone because we didn't have the athletes to guard the teams we were playing in the Big East, but we were still able to win. If teams overplayed us we just back-doored them all night.
"When Coach Beilein got to Michigan and started recruiting some of the top players in the country, he tweaked what he was doing to fit the guys he was getting there," he added.
Gansey senior season at WVU in 2006 was even better than his first.
He scored 20 or more points in a game 11 times, including a career-high 33 points in a 104-85 victory over Marquette at the Coliseum.
Mike poured in 28 in a narrow loss to LeMarcus Aldridge-led Texas, had 25 in a close defeat against Final Four-bound LSU and scored 24 in one of the great road wins in school history when WVU knocked off 18th-ranked UCLA, 60-56, at famed Pauley Pavilion. His steal and subsequent free throw with seven seconds left iced the game.
His terrific 25-point effort on 10-of-13 shooting almost helped West Virginia knock off top-ranked Connecticut at the Coliseum late that season, and the concluding game of his brilliant two-year Mountaineer career against Texas in Atlanta's Georgia Dome saw him go for 18 points and six rebounds in a three-point loss to ninth-ranked Texas in the NCAA Tournament Sweet 16.
Gansey's 68 games at West Virginia amounted to 976 points, 369 rebounds, 164 assists, 119 steals, 46 victories, back-to-back NCAA Tournament appearances, consecutive top-25 finishes and the start of a 14-year run that has continued with Bob Huggins, featuring 11 trips to the NCAA Tournament, eight Sweet 16 appearances, a Final Four berth and an NIT championship in 2007.
"How many other programs can say they have had as much success for as long as West Virginia has had under two different coaches?" Gansey pointed out. "Both are great, hall of fame coaches and all they do is win."
It's the longest sustained period of success for Mountaineer basketball since the late 1940s and 1950s under coaches Lee Patton, Red Brown and Fred Schaus, when West Virginia was considered one of the premier hoop programs in the country.
Indeed, a dramatic turnaround from West Virginia's 20-loss season in 2002 just two years before Gansey's Mountaineer debut in 2004.
"It was the best two years of my life," Gansey said. "I just wish it could have been four instead of only two."
His post-collegiate basketball career has included a three-year stint playing overseas and two more years in the NBA's G League before assuming a front office role with the Canton Charge, which eventually turned into a leadership role with the Cleveland Cavaliers two years ago.
He is now assistant general manager for a Cleveland team facing the Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals for the fourth straight year.
"My mother always told me hard work pays off," Gansey explained. "I just wanted to get a scholarship and go to college and play basketball. If you work harder than everyone else, eventually good things will happen to you."
They did.
Gansey and his wife, Amy, reside in Avon, Ohio, with their daughters, Reagan and Emerson, and son, Griffin.
The Mountaineer football team, under Rich Rodriguez, quarterback Pat White and tailback Steve Slaton, was thriving, achieving top 10-status for an unprecedented three straight years in 2005, 2006 and 2007.
The WVU men's basketball program also experienced a resurgence after John Beilein finally got things going when a guy named Mike Gansey decided to transfer in from St. Bonaventure.
WVU reached the NCAA Tournament Elite Eight during Gansey's first season with the Mountaineers in 2005 and made a return trip to the Sweet 16 during his senior season in 2006.
"It was a real fun time," Gansey said via cell phone from Los Angeles International Airport Wednesday afternoon. "We used to try and one-up the football team because they were so good at the time. I even had a couple of classes with Steve Slaton and we used to joke about it."
West Virginia has had plenty of basketball transfers through the years, some performing extremely well, but none made an impact quite like Gansey, a skinny, 6-foot-4-inch shooting guard from Olmsted Falls, Ohio.
When Beilein, coaching at Richmond, first saw Gansey play for the Bonnies he asked his assistant coaches why they couldn't recruit guys like him. When Gansey became available a year after Beilein took the West Virginia job, he pursued him like he was LeBron James.
At the time, Gansey said he was looking for a place where he could possibly play in the NCAA Tournament and after making a recruiting visit to Morgantown, the first of three he had scheduled at different schools, he canceled the others and committed to the Mountaineers.
"I was dead set on transferring and WVU was my first visit," Gansey recalled. "After leaving Morgantown, I realized something special was going on here and I wanted to be a part of it."
Fourteen years later, Gansey is joining White, Slaton and eight others in West Virginia University's 2018 Sports Hall of Fame class, announced last Sunday by Director of Athletics Shane Lyons.
This group, which also includes WVU's all-time leading rusher Avon Cobourne, two-time rifle national champion Web Wright, 1994 NCAA women's gymnastics coach of the year Bev Fry Plocki, professional football standouts Tom Keane and Larry Krutko, record-setting men's soccer goalkeeper Jon Capon, women's basketball standout Kate Bulger and 55-year WVU administrator Eleanor Lamb, is arguably the strongest hall of fame class since the inaugural one in 1991 that included Jerry West, Ira Errett Rodgers, Sam Huff, Joe Stydahar, Chuck Howley and others.
"I'm excited and honored to be recognized with such a great group of people," Gansey said. "I just can't believe it happened so quickly."
Gansey came to West Virginia shortly after the basketball program was reeling from a disastrous 2002 campaign that saw the Mountaineers lose 18 of their final 19 games and fail to make the Big East Tournament.
A 27-point loss in the final game ever played at Pitt's Fitzgerald Field House was one of the low points in the long, storied history of Mountaineer basketball. Then, after a week-long false start with Dan Dakich, Beilein was brought in to resurrect the program.
Two positive seasons in 2003 and 2004 set the stage for Gansey's Mountaineer debut against St. Peter's at the Coliseum on Nov. 20, 2004. He scored 16 points, handed out seven assists and grabbed four rebounds in WVU's 12-point victory over the Peacocks.
Things only got better from there.
Over the final month of the season, Gansey averaged 15.4 points, 5.9 rebounds and shot 62.5 percent from the floor to take West Virginia from the NCAA Tournament bubble to its first appearance in the Big Dance in seven years.
His unforgettable 22-point, 15-rebound performance in the Big East Tournament semifinals against Villanova included the game-winning free throws with just 0.2 seconds left on the clock.
"We beat Providence and Ryan Gomes three times that year and also beat Boston College in its last Big East game before going to the ACC just to get into the NCAA Tournament," he recalled.
In West Virginia's NCAA Tournament first-round victory over Creighton in Cleveland, Gansey played a vital role in the winning play at the end when he caught an outlet pass from Kevin Pittsnogle at midcourt and fired a perfect strike to a streaking Tyrone Sally for a slam dunk ahead of the buzzer.
Amazingly, the basketball never touched the floor on that perfectly executed play.
Two nights later, Gansey, playing in front of friends and family at the Wolstein Center, had one of the greatest individual performances ever by a Mountaineer player in the NCAA Tournament, scoring 29 points and grabbing eight rebounds to help WVU stun No. 2-seeded and fifth-ranked Wake Forest, 111-105, in double overtime.
Many believed that Wake Forest team, led by All-America guard Chris Paul and outstanding center Eric Williams, was destined to reach the Final Four until Gansey took over the game.
Gansey also played well in West Virginia's 65-60 victory over Texas Tech in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to reach the Elite Eight, where the Mountaineers fell in overtime to Louisville after leading the Cardinals by 20 points in the first half.
It was West Virginia's deepest run in the NCAA Tournament since Jerry West led the Mountaineers to the finals in 1959.
"The reason we won so many games is because we had the ultimate team chemistry," Gansey explained. "We weren't as talented as most of the teams we beat, but we had guys like Joe Herber who knew where everybody was supposed to go, great shooters like Kevin Pittsnogle, tough point guards like J.D. Collins and Darris Nichols, and we were in harmony with that 1-3-1 zone. I was the last straggler to come along and I was slow to learn all of the stuff."
It did take Gansey a while to pick up Beilein's unique system, which included such plays as "Double Quickie Potato," "Dirty Harry," "Best Play Ever," "Football" and "Bonnie," which came about as a result of Gansey constantly messing up one particular read.
"I ran the play wrong and ended up scoring anyway and he liked the variation off of it and ended up calling it for me," Gansey chuckled.
That was the beauty of Beilein's system - it was so adaptive to the players he had.
"Our team at West Virginia was unique," Gansey recalled. "We had to make five or six passes before we could take a shot; we had to play zone because we didn't have the athletes to guard the teams we were playing in the Big East, but we were still able to win. If teams overplayed us we just back-doored them all night.
"When Coach Beilein got to Michigan and started recruiting some of the top players in the country, he tweaked what he was doing to fit the guys he was getting there," he added.
Gansey senior season at WVU in 2006 was even better than his first.
He scored 20 or more points in a game 11 times, including a career-high 33 points in a 104-85 victory over Marquette at the Coliseum.
Mike poured in 28 in a narrow loss to LeMarcus Aldridge-led Texas, had 25 in a close defeat against Final Four-bound LSU and scored 24 in one of the great road wins in school history when WVU knocked off 18th-ranked UCLA, 60-56, at famed Pauley Pavilion. His steal and subsequent free throw with seven seconds left iced the game.
His terrific 25-point effort on 10-of-13 shooting almost helped West Virginia knock off top-ranked Connecticut at the Coliseum late that season, and the concluding game of his brilliant two-year Mountaineer career against Texas in Atlanta's Georgia Dome saw him go for 18 points and six rebounds in a three-point loss to ninth-ranked Texas in the NCAA Tournament Sweet 16.Gansey's 68 games at West Virginia amounted to 976 points, 369 rebounds, 164 assists, 119 steals, 46 victories, back-to-back NCAA Tournament appearances, consecutive top-25 finishes and the start of a 14-year run that has continued with Bob Huggins, featuring 11 trips to the NCAA Tournament, eight Sweet 16 appearances, a Final Four berth and an NIT championship in 2007.
"How many other programs can say they have had as much success for as long as West Virginia has had under two different coaches?" Gansey pointed out. "Both are great, hall of fame coaches and all they do is win."
It's the longest sustained period of success for Mountaineer basketball since the late 1940s and 1950s under coaches Lee Patton, Red Brown and Fred Schaus, when West Virginia was considered one of the premier hoop programs in the country.
Indeed, a dramatic turnaround from West Virginia's 20-loss season in 2002 just two years before Gansey's Mountaineer debut in 2004.
"It was the best two years of my life," Gansey said. "I just wish it could have been four instead of only two."
His post-collegiate basketball career has included a three-year stint playing overseas and two more years in the NBA's G League before assuming a front office role with the Canton Charge, which eventually turned into a leadership role with the Cleveland Cavaliers two years ago.
He is now assistant general manager for a Cleveland team facing the Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals for the fourth straight year.
"My mother always told me hard work pays off," Gansey explained. "I just wanted to get a scholarship and go to college and play basketball. If you work harder than everyone else, eventually good things will happen to you."
They did.
Gansey and his wife, Amy, reside in Avon, Ohio, with their daughters, Reagan and Emerson, and son, Griffin.
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