MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – When you've worked at the same place for 42 years you're bound to have some stories, and West Virginia University's Bubba Schmidt has plenty of them.
 
Like the time he once walked into the basketball locker room and heard a couple of players discussing how long of a drive it was to get to Hawaii.
 
"Hey Guinness (Bubba's substitute word for genius), you can't drive there. There's this thing called the Pacific Ocean that runs between California and Hawaii!" he said.
 
Or the time he had to go up to the basketball office and retrieve all of Dan Dakich's stuff only eight days after he was hired to replace Gale Catlett.
 
The morning Dakich was about to be introduced to Mountaineer Nation, he sat in Schmidt's equipment room, below a poster-sized picture of Jack Lord, discussing his grand plan for West Virginia University basketball (Schmidt was a big Hawaii Five-O fan, by the way).
 
"He said, 'We need to have a meeting at some point,'" Schmidt recalled recently. "We talked and he goes, 'I want all of those pictures in the locker room taken down.' I said, 'Okay.' Then he said, 'Do you like that music they play in there?' I said, 'not really' and he said he didn't either. 'Take the stereo system out of there!'
 
"He said, 'Now they're going to start lifting weights. Do they have stuff to wear? Why don't we just give them a sweatshirt.' I said, 'no problem, coach.'"
 
Schmidt then informed his new boss that he had a previously-planned trip the following week to see The Masters in Augusta, Georgia, and would not be in the office.
 
"By all means, go," Dakich said. "You need to go see that place."
 
So Schmidt did, stopping by Hilton Head Island on the way. It was there Bubba first learned that Dakich's feet were getting a little cold.
 
"I'm on the balcony of our place and I'm talking on the phone with a buddy of mine from Wheeling, and he says we're about to get another basketball coach. I said, 'What are you talking about?' He said there were rumors all over the place that Dakich was leaving because he had discovered some problems with the basketball program," Schmidt mentioned. "I said, 'You're crazy.' So, we go to the practice round on Wednesday, come back Thursday, and I get into the office on Friday morning, a nice, day, sunny …"
 
No sooner had Schmidt sat down at his desk to begin reading the newspaper when the phone rang. It was associate athletic director Garrett Ford.
 
"'Hey Bubba, you need to come up here to the basketball office and get all of this stuff,'" Ford said.
 
"What stuff?"
 
"All of this luggage, shirts and shoes sitting up here for the coaching staff," Ford answered.
 
"What for?" Bubba asked.
 
"Because they left," Ford said.
 
"Where'd they go?"
 
"Back to Bowling Green," Ford replied.
 
And that basically sums up Bubba's eight days working for West Virginia basketball coach Dan Dakich.
 
Schmidt, who is retiring as WVU's athletic equipment manager at the end of this month, has worked for five different men's basketball coaches since the 1977-78 season. He began at the tail end of Joedy Gardner's brief four-year tenure, worked all of the Gale Catlett years plus those eight days with Dakich in 2003, John Beilein's five seasons here from 2003-07, as well as Bob Huggins' current 12-year tenure.
 
Those coaches have produced a lot of great players, great teams and great games through the years, and Schmidt has been here to see it all.
 
His introduction to intercollegiate athletics came by chance one fall afternoon. Like many other physical education students back in the mid-1970s, Bubba used to hang out at the Coliseum and play lunchtime basketball between classes. That's how he got to know the Coliseum's equipment manager, Ed Crawford, and out of that came a job offer when the guy Crawford had helping him left to take a job in Elkins.
 
"Ed said, 'Do you want a part-time job?'" Schmidt recalled. "I said, 'What do I have to do?' He told me about it and I said I'd do it. I did that for him for about a year and the following summer when coach Catlett got hired, (football equipment manager) Carl Roberts was at a picnic or something and fell and broke his ankle.
 
"Ed had to go down to the old stadium and take care of football for Carl, and he never came back to the Coliseum," Schmidt said. "That's how I got the job."
 
When Bubba, whose given name is Robert, was first hired to oversee athletic equipment for the entire department with the exception of football, his staff meetings required closing the door to his office, turning off the lights and talking to himself.
 
Not really, but that perfectly illustrates how much help he had back then.
 
"I didn't get my first graduate assistant until 1991," Schmidt said. "I didn't have a full-time assistant until '97. I had everything except for football with eight work-study students and two equipment rooms – here and the Shell."
 
Today, when the basketball team travels, there is at least one full-time athletic equipment manager, sometimes two, plus five managers to take care of all of the team gear. When Bubba started it was him and one other student manager handling the trips.
 
"In those days you worked," he said.
 
Team travel was all commercial flights, meaning there was always the possibility of bags getting lost. Schmidt solved that issue by generously tipping the baggage handlers at the Pittsburgh Airport whenever the team flew to road games.
 
"The guys I dealt with up in Pittsburgh, when they saw us coming they always took care of us," Schmidt said. "I never had any team bags missing, but we've had some personal bags missing every now and then. But I wasn't worried about the equipment bags."
 
When Beilein became the coach in 2003, the players were required to take their own uniforms and warmups with them on the plane to games. Then afterward, Schmidt and his guys gathered up their stuff from a big pile on the floor in the locker room and placed them in an equipment bag to have them washed when the team returned to Morgantown.
 
Today, the players are once again responsible for only their personal stuff and shoes when they go on road trips. Bubba's guys take care of the rest.
 
In the days when the Mountaineers used to play in the Atlantic 10 Conference, Schmidt said there were several places he enjoyed traveling to, one of them being Olean, New York, of all places. That trip usually consisted of either a long bus ride through lots of snow up to Western New York, or a harrowing flight into Bradford, Pennsylvania, leading to a restless night at the charming Castle Inn, just across the street from St. Bonaventure's campus.
 
Once that propeller-driven plane was safely on the ground and came to a complete stop in Bedford, it didn't really matter where the team slept that night.
 
"I remember one landing there the pilot was like 30 yards left of the runway trying to land the plane in a snowstorm," Schmidt laughed. "I'll never forget that. I've never seen coach Catlett get up out of his seat quicker than that. We also had a nice one coming back from Penn State one time, too. Of course, you've got to understand these weren't jets – they were prop planes, and we were flying right through the clouds for the entire trip."
 
When the Mountaineers played St. Joseph's in Philadelphia, Schmidt said his favorite place to go was Billy Cunningham's Court down the street from the Conshohocken Marriott where the team used to stay. There was a great cheesesteak place right next to the Hawks' little basketball arena, which was also where the Philadelphia 76ers used to practice.
 
"We had a shootaround before we were playing St. Joe's one time and the Sixers were scheduled to practice once we got off the floor," Schmidt remembered. "Some of the Philadelphia players were sitting in the stands, including (Charles) Barkley, and Bernard Blunt, one of (St. Joe's) better players, sat down next to Barkley.
 
"(Barkley) said, 'Hey, Bernie, you're about to take an ass beating tonight from West Virginia!' I nearly fell over laughing," Schmidt said.
 
Another time, when referee Dutch Sample walked into the locker room at The Palestra to inform the team that Lester Rowe's tip-in basket at the buzzer to beat St. Joe's was being disallowed - a decision made after the game with both teams already in the locker room - nobody associated with the West Virginia basketball team was laughing.
 
That was probably the closest Gale Catlett ever came to punching out an official. And by the way, the Cat had a history of slugging guys during his playing days with the Mountaineers in the early 1960s.
 
"Coach lost it," Schmidt recalled.
 
Bubba also chuckled when recalling the birds, squirrels and raccoons that sometimes prowled the rafters at UMass' Curry Hicks Cage, or the classroom the team had to dress in whenever the Mountaineers played Rhode Island in old Keaney Gymnasium.
 
"They had no locker rooms," Bubba said. "We dressed upstairs."
 
Temple's tiny McGonigle Hall at least had locker rooms. Schmidt's issue with the Owls' old facility was the trip down Broad Street to get there.
 
"I used to get to the arena 45 minutes before the team did to have everything ready for them," Schmidt said. "So, I would take a cab or a hotel shuttle to the arena, and we're driving down Broad Street from City Line Marriott about 9:30 in the morning and on the right hand side of the street there were these three guys just beating the @#$% out of each other. I asked the cab driver, 'Does that happen a lot around here?' He said, 'Oh, only about every other block.'"
 
On one occasion, when the Mountaineers upset Temple to end its long McGonigle Hall winning streak, the team was stuck in a big traffic jam after they left the arena. And it wasn't from fans leaving the game but rather because an entire city block was engulfed in flames!
 
Once West Virginia got into the Big East, Schmidt said South Florida became his favorite road trip when the Bulls were added to the league's constantly changing membership. For many years the department's best golfer, Schmidt would sometimes take his clubs with him whenever the Mountaineers traveled to Tampa.
 
He also enjoyed the trips to cold-weather DePaul, but for a different reason.
 
"There was never anybody there for the games, but you stayed five minutes from the place, and you were only 10 minutes from O'Hare (Airport), so that was an easy trip," Schmidt said.
 
Schmidt listed West Virginia's big victories over UNLV and Pitt shortly into Catlett's tenure as great memories, as well as beating 15^th-ranked Temple at the Coliseum in 1984 - the year the Atlantic 10 Tournament was played there. 
 
He also mentioned the blowout victory at Syracuse in the Carrier Dome early in the 1997 season and even the pregame Kentucky atmosphere at the Coliseum a couple of years ago as two other unforgettable moments.
 
Bubba's most thrilling memory, however, was seeing Huggins' Mountaineers reach the Final Four in 2010 by upsetting Kentucky in Syracuse. Making the occasion extra special was having two of his daughters, Kaylee and Iliana, with him in the Carrier Dome that night.
 
"That was pretty cool," he said.
 
Schmidt rattled off a list of some of the great WVU players he's observed during his 42 years here, beginning with Greg Jones, Lester Rowe and Dale Blaney, and continuing with Damian Owens, Gordon Malone ("one of the most talented players I've ever been around," he said), Mike Gansey, Kevin Pittsnogle, Joe Herber, Joe Alexander, Truck Bryant, Da'Sean Butler, Kevin Jones, Juwan Staten and Jevon Carter.
 
"I've seen a bunch of good ones," Schmidt said.
 
He admits he's had his go-to guys through the years - players he could go to when he needed cooperation or something done.
 
"For the most part, I got along with most of our players. There were a couple knuckleheads, but you get that everywhere," Schmidt said. "Most of the time I had a guy or two, if I had a problem in the locker room, I would go to them and they'd handle it.
 
"Lester took care of all that business. Seldon Jefferson took care of things. Beilein's guys were never a problem, but if something came up Gansey made sure things got taken care of," Schmidt said. "And believe it or not, Truck was always a guy you could count on. He was good at that, he really was."
 
Of the coaches, Schmidt was always a big fan of Huggins from the days when they were WVU classmates until now, and Catlett, the coach for whom he spent the most years working.
 
"Coach (Catlett) was very to the point," Schmidt said. "If he liked you, you knew it, and if he didn't like you, you knew it; he played no favorites. That's sort of how I ran the equipment room for probably the first 32 years. I've mellowed a lot in the last 10 years."
 
He's seen many great opposing players come to the Coliseum through the years, too, guys such as Lenny Bias, Allen Iverson, Kerry Kittles, Carmelo Anthony, Troy Murphy, Luke Harangody, Russell Westbrook and Trey Young, just to name a few.
 
But the opposing player who impressed Schmidt the most is someone the casual college basketball fan would have a difficult time remembering.
 
"Of all those guys, the one who played the best game I've ever seen at the Coliseum was a guard from Bowling Green named Antonio Daniels," he said. "He dunked one on Lawrence Pollard … I'm just telling you."
 
Schmidt said Oklahoma's Blake Griffin was another impressive dunker, the best one he saw coming at the Charleston Civic Center over Alex Ruoff, he recalled.
 
Schmidt's stories go on and on, even though his time at WVU is coming to a close.
 
His streak of more than 500 straight home basketball games ended the day Huggins earned his 800^thcareer victory against UMKC on Dec. 17, 2016.  Bubba's absence came with a good reason though: his daughter, Kaylee, was graduating with honors from Lipscomb University.
 
All three of his daughters are brilliant students. Iliana just finished her freshman year at Northwestern and Anne Peyton, now a senior at Morgantown High, is being courted by prestigious academic universities from coast to coast.
 
Bubba says they take after his wife, Betsey, a former WVU athletic trainer who now works at HealthWorks.
 
He cited the terrific help he's had making the athletic equipment room run so efficiently through the years, "a bunch of great guys who were really helpful," he said. "Tim Hardwick (now a physical therapist in Morgantown) still calls me on every birthday. That's important.
 
"It's been fun and it's hard to believe it's coming to an end, but it is, and it's for the best," Schmidt remarked. 
 
His last official day at the Coliseum will be May 31. After that he plans on working for his buddy Donnie Schillinger out at Mountaineer Golf Course during the summertime.
 
Schmidt said he's also had some local schools contact him about doing some consulting work. He may take them up on that as well.
 
When basketball season arrives later this fall, it will be odd looking down behind the basket near the equipment room and not seeing Bubba standing there, arms folded, watching the action.
 
"I will miss the basketball games. I will come to some, but when you retire you need to stay away. It's their time now," he concluded.
 
Congratulations, Bubba, on your well-deserved retirement. Forty-two years working anywhere is an accomplishment, but spending 42 at one place is truly amazing!