(GETTING TO KNOW YOU: There’s a new basketball sheriff in town. His name is Darian DeVries and over the next few days we’ll try to introduce you to him as a basketball coach and player. TODAY: “Our intention is to win ... and win now.”)
morgantown — Sitting at the long, rich table that dominates the conference room in West Virginia’s basketball facility across from Darian DeVries on Wednesday afternoon, one’s mind could not help but drift back exactly a year to the day.
That was when, across the street known as Gale Catlett Drive, Josh Eilert was being introduced to the media by athletic director Wren Baker as the interim coach who would replace Hall of Fame coach Bob Huggins.
On that day the feeling was like Alice journeying into Wonderland. Fittingly, a few hours after talking with DeVries, Morgantown found itself under a tornado warning, as if to remind us all of how Alice had been whisked out of Victorian England and taken to Wonderland.
On that day a year earlier, uncertainty was rampant in the Mountaineer basketball program, an inexperienced coach taking over a team without a roster, expectations having crashed from potential Big 12 contender to unimagined depths that would produce a 9-23 season, the most losses ever for a Mountaineers team.
Now, DeVries has arrived to return sanity to a situation where the Mountaineers had little more than its tradition of excellence to lean upon, just one returning player — not one starter, but instead a player who came off the bench.
DeVries is a successful mid-major coach from Drake who turned around what had been a dismal program when he left Creighton after 20 years as an assistant. He understood then what he was getting into as he noted that expectations for his team were so low that in the Missouri Valley Conference preseason poll that “I think there were 10 teams and we were picked 11th.”
But he managed to turn darkness into light, noting “We ended up winning the league that year” and isn’t ready to accept that this is a lost year as he begins to establish himself as West Virginia’s coach.
When it was suggested that with a roster garnered from the four corners of the earth and just now beginning to get to know each other and the coaching staff, it was like having 13 freshmen playing the game.
He refused to accept that built-in excuse.
“I think if you had 13 freshmen, the approach would be that there will be some growing pains.
“That’s not our intention,” he said.
And just what are the Mountaineers’ intentions in Year 1 of the Darian DeVries era in what is now a new, expanded and reshaped Big 12?
“Our intention is to win .... And win now. That’s why these guys are here,” he said.
Rebuilding, he stressed, is for carpenters, not basketball coaches or players.
“This isn’t a rebuilding year,” he said, emphatically. “This group has every intention of wanting to play in the NCAA Tournament. That’s their goal, to get there.”
He knows it won’t be easy, but believes there is time to mold what many experts believe to be a strong recruiting class through the portal and led by his own son, Tucker DeVries, who comes off shoulder surgery after a season in which he averaged 21 points a game at Drake, into a winning team.
“It’s a long way from now. We’re in the last week of June, but so is everybody else in the country,” he said. “I do like the mindset this group has. I want them to have that mindset and if they carry that out every single day there’s no reason why we can’t achieve that goal.”
That journey is still in its infancy. Hours after our conversation it was announced that he completed his staff with the hiring of veteran Tom Ostrom, who had spent the last two years on his staff at Drake and the four previous years as an assistant at Indiana.
And while recruiting is a never-ending endeavor he has a roster now with the holdover Ofri Naveh, son Tucker, two Illinois transfers in forward Amani Hansberry and guard Sencire Harris, guard Javon Small of Oklahoma State, center Eduardo Andre from London, England, by way of Fresno State, Australian guard Jayden Stone from Detroit Mercy, senior guard Joseph Yesufu, who played last year at Washington State and was injured after playing at Drake and Kansas, Duquesne transfer guard Toby Okani, guard Jake Aver from Rockland College, WVU football player Ader Tagaloa-Nelson and freshmen guards Dylan Jay from Washington, Jonathan Powell from Dayton, Ohio, and K.J. Tenner from Memphis.
That’s 14 players that are a long way from “13 freshmen, being broken down as five fifth-year seniors, two normal seniors, four sophom*ores and three freshmen.”
It is a small roster with just one player listed as a center and two as forwards, one of them being Naveh, who is listed at 6-6, 185.
“Any time you start with just one — and with a coaching change you are typically getting a later start — you started behind and few pieces were off the board, but the way we put the roster together I think they complement each other very well,” DeVries said.
“We need to stay healthy in certain spots, but that’s typical of a lot of teams. Overall, we have a hungry group. They are here for the right reasons. They want to win individually and collectively they want to make sure we do the right things to get there.”
And, if it works out, they go from Alice in Wonderland to Cinderella.
“I think it would be a great story. It would say a lot about the guys in the locker room and the way they approached it. We’ll be real. There’s not a lot of expectations on this group,” DeVries said.
“The only expectations on them are the ones we talk about inside our locker room. Those are the expectations we are going to try to live up to every day. We do that, I feel very confident results will come with it.”
