MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - Marlon LeBlanc begins his 14th season at West Virginia University later today. Eight years ago, when West Virginia announced it was leaving the Big East to join the Big 12, you had to wonder if that was even possible.
 
Was he willing to stick around this long?
 
The move from the Big East to the Big 12 back in 2011 was tremendous for everything related to West Virginia University with one exception – men's soccer.
 
That's because the Big 12 doesn't sponsor the sport.
 
"I would see people and they would ask me, 'How is Big 12 men's soccer?' LeBlanc recalled earlier this week. "I'd have to tell them there isn't Big 12 men's soccer. People didn't quite grasp that or get that."
 
Many people also didn't quite grasp or get what was happening to LeBlanc's WVU program, one that made 11 NCAA tournament appearances from 1966 to 2011 and had produced a number of All-Americans and professional players.
 
When LeBlanc took over the team in 2006 he won 29 games his first two seasons, beat Penn State for the first time since Richard Nixon was president, and had WVU thinking really big in the Big East.
 
By 2011, he had the Mountaineers among the top two or three programs in what was then considered one of the strongest men's soccer conferences in the country. 
 
NCAA Tournament travel plans were always written in pen.
 
But then he got a call from then-athletic director Oliver Luck on his cell phone as he was getting ready to leave his hotel room for an important conference match at Seton Hall later that day.
 
"Marlon," Oliver began. "Tomorrow we are announcing that we are leaving the Big East for the Big 12, and I wanted to let you know before you heard about it on the news."
 
LeBlanc told Luck he couldn't think about it at that moment because his mind was focused on playing Seton Hall later that day, which turned out to be a Mountaineer victory. He didn't think much about it immediately afterward either because he was on a bus headed out to South Bend, Indiana, to complete a two-game weekend road trip at Notre Dame.
 
His team won that match, too, knocking off the 14th-ranked Irish in impressive fashion, 2-0. Soon afterward, while his team was celebrating one of its best victories of the season during a very long bus ride back to Morgantown, it hit him like a hard slap in the face – his soccer program might be dead in the water!
 
"I'm thinking to myself, 'Oh my god, Oliver called me and told me we are leaving the Big East for the Big 12.' I'll never forget that feeling," LeBlanc said. "We went from the highest of highs, winning two huge road games in the Big East to, 'Whoa, where are we headed here?'"
 
He didn't know. Nobody did.
 
Many different options were considered. Remaining in the Big East for one year as a provisional member playing a full Big East schedule that didn't count toward the league standings was tossed around. 
 
Spending a year as an independent was also contemplated.
 
Applying for admission into Conference USA where Kentucky and South Carolina were members was another possibility (SEC also doesn't sponsor men's soccer). But ultimately, the decision was made to join the Mid-American Conference, a soccer league that was basically Akron and six other schools. The Zips had gone five straight years in the MAC without losing a single conference match.
 
"The MAC at the time was like the 14th or 15th best soccer conference in the country," LeBlanc recalled.
 
Instead of playing 11 Big East matches a year and never worrying about his RPI for the NCAA Tournament, LeBlanc was now confronted with a schedule that included six Mid-American games, five of which were going to damage the team's RPI.
 
And there wasn't enough time to schedule other nonconference matches to compensate for the move to the MAC.
 
"Scheduling is made two and three years in advance, so we were trying to find games for two and three years down the road that were as meaningful as Notre Dame, UConn, Louisville, Georgetown and these other soccer powerhouses were," he admitted.
 
Yet scheduling wasn't even his biggest problem. His No. 1 issue was recruiting. The Northeast, where he was most familiar having grown up in New Jersey and once coaching at Penn State, was no longer an option.
 
Overseas recruiting was also off the table because of NCAA infractions associated with the prior coaching staff, and there wasn't (and still isn't) a reliable in-state talent pool in West Virginia to harvest.
 
So he was basically out in the cold there as well.
 
"If there was anything I did wrong, it was probably how much I underestimated leaving the Big East was going to affect our recruiting," he admitted. 
 
Decoding the coachspeak, it was a catastrophe.
 
Eventually, LeBlanc was allowed to resume foreign recruiting, and he also began focusing on other parts of the country. He developed a strong relationship with Sporting KC Academy that eventually delivered him Joey Piatczyc, and he also started to more actively recruit developmental players.
 
His rationale: let's take the hit in years one and two in hopes that years three and four will be really good. That's what happened with Jack Elliott, today one of the top center backs in MLS playing for Philadelphia Union. Elliott wasn't even an all-conference player at West Virginia, but he got better and better and better.
 
"We changed our recruiting philosophy and said 'let's look at development,'" LeBlanc explained. "And development around the world stops at 16. They cut you at 16 years old if you are not good enough, and here I was looking at kids that are 18 and trying to develop them."
 
He also looked more closely at players who didn't quite fit the size requirements for certain positions, such as 5-foot-10 goalkeeper Steven Tekesky on this year's team.
 
"You are initially thinking, 'Wow, how is he going to come in and play big-time Division I soccer at that size?' Then his first game is against Michigan State when they were No. 1 in the country in the RPI, and he shuts them out, and he hasn't looked back since," LeBlanc said.
 
There was another factor that really helped LeBlanc's West Virginia's program: the MAC got better by getting smaller.
 
Instead of having an eight-team conference that was bottom heavy, it got leaner and meaner with just six by jettisoning three and adding SIU Edwardsville, a men's program steeped in tradition. The Cougars were an annual NCAA tournament participant in the 1970s before dropping down to Division II for a few years in the early 2000s. Then, the Cougars decided to return to Division I and reemphasize the sport and a Missouri Valley Conference championship soon followed in 2015. 
 
For the last two years, SIUE has been a member of the MAC, where it has improved from seven wins in 2017 to nine wins last season. Consequently, the Mid-American Conference's men's soccer RPI has risen from 14th or 15th when WVU joined the league seven years ago to No. 3 last year.
 
Not coincidentally, West Virginia's stock has risen as well. The Mountaineers returned to the NCAA Tournament last year for the first time since 2011, WVU's unexpected swan song in the Big East, and finished ranked No. 17 in the final Soccer America poll.
 
The Mountaineers' 14 victories were their most in a season since LeBlanc led West Virginia to a 14-6 record in 2007 during a campaign in which it defeated fifth-ranked Duke, sixth-ranked Maryland and No. 1-ranked Connecticut.
 
This year, despite losing Piatczyc, LeBlanc has nine starters returning which comprised 71 percent of last year's scoring. West Virginia finished ahead of NCAA runner-up Akron in last season's MAC regular-season standings and it was a hand-ball goal that wasn't called at Maryland away from tying the Terps in College Park.
 
Maryland, of course, was last year's National Champion.
 
His team begins the 2019 season later today against Monmouth ranked 23rd in the preseason coaches' poll and No. 25 in the TopDrawerSoccer.com poll released Monday.
 
Looking ahead to the future, LeBlanc said he has already gotten five commitments for the 2020 class. He admits the past six or seven years have mellowed him quite a bit, and he's also changed the way he deals with his players.
 
"I used to work off the premise that it's easier for 25 or 30 players to adapt to me than it is for me to adapt to 30 different guys," he explained. "Over the last four or five years, I've changed the way I feel about that. 
 
"I think it's more along the lines of you can't treat everybody the same," LeBlanc continued. "You treat them all fairly, but you can't treat them all the same."
 
Now, with Big East move in the rearview mirror and armed with a more holistic approach to his team, LeBlanc can look forward to a more secure future for men's soccer at West Virginia. If not more secure, which is probably unrealistic in college sports these days, at least the program's future is now stabilized.
 
"I decided to look at it in terms of the long picture instead of the short picture. Maybe we had some lean years in there where instead of having 11 or 12 wins, we ended up with nine or 10. But, now, we're starting to get on the back end of that a little bit," LeBlanc concluded.