(WVU basektabll – Graphic illustration generated with help from ChatGPT)
MORGANTOWN — The Twenty third-ranked WVU girls’s basketball group will host Appalachian State at 10:15 a.m. at present for its annual Education Day recreation.
What meaning is there might be about 10,000 screaming kids bused in from elementary faculties throughout the state. They might be loud. Their screams will hit a high-enough pitch to in all probability break glass in some unspecified time in the future.
It will definitely be a special kind of really feel contained in the Hope Coliseum.
The one man who couldn’t care much less is WVU head coach Mark Kellogg. Not at present. Not tomorrow. Not ever once more at any level sooner or later will Kellogg be the man who complains about having to beat any kind of adversity throughout a recreation.
Not after what he and his Mountaineers went by final Friday in knocking off Duke, 57-49, inside The Greenbrier Resort.
What Kellogg went by in beating the Blue Devils can be a coach’s model of a extremely dangerous dream.
Like, bear in mind once we have been all youngsters and also you dreamed about standing at your college locker with none pants on otherwise you’re working down the hallway to get to class and that hallway simply kept getting longer and longer?
For a basketball coach, the model of that dream is wanting round a packed area in a giant recreation and your finest participant isn’t there and your depth isn’t there and, effectively, your gamers are nowhere to be discovered.
The one exception to that is the fictional Norman Dale, who within the unbelievable film “Hoosiers,” selected to complete a recreation with simply 4 gamers relatively than subbing in a participant who refused to take heed to him.
“My team is on the floor,” Dale instructed the referee.
Last Friday was not fiction, although. You know the story. You know concerning the shoving match on the finish of the primary half. You know the way WVU (4-0) had 4 of its starters ejected and was pressured to complete the sport with simply 5 gamers on its out there roster.
What we don’t know is the within scoop, which did come later by way of a social media put up launched by WVU. In it, we bought an inside look to how Kellogg dealt with a nightmarish scenario with poise and confidence.
On the video, his gamers are yelling, shrugging and dipping their heads into their arms throughout halftime. There is chaos and panic.
Just not with Kellogg, who, oh by the best way, goes for his five hundredth profession teaching victory at present.
“We have five players,” Kellogg tells his group. “So, we are going to have to play our what?”
A participant quietly solutions, “Our hardest.”
“We have to play absolutely the hardest we’ve ever played,” Kellogg continued. “It’s going to take the five of us and we’re going to figure this out.”
What occurred subsequent was perhaps one thing out of Hollywood. Those 5 gamers – starter Sydney Shaw and 4 bench gamers – manhandled the then Fifteenth-ranked Blue Devils. WVU outscored Duke, 24-9 within the third quarter.
“We need you, all right?” Kellogg stated throughout a timeout, urging his group to provide a supreme effort. “We’ve got timeouts. We’ll use them in the fourth (quarter) if we need them.”
Later within the recreation, Kellogg is sitting at one other timeout slamming the top of his marker in opposition to his clipboard.
“Possession by possession,” he screamed. “Defend and rebound. Defend and rebound. We have to defend without fouling, but you’ve got to play hard.”
Duke, inevitably, started to attract nearer.
“There’s no way, if they don’t score, it’s impossible for them to win the game,” Kellogg stated.
And by some means, a way, Kellogg and his Iron 5 got here away with, perhaps, what needs to be one of the memorable WVU basketball wins of all-time.
We’re speaking each women and men. Like this recreation, all issues thought-about, ought to nestle up someplace alongside John Beilein’s upset of No. 2 seed Wake Forest within the 2005 NCAA match and Bob Huggins’ victory over Kentucky in 2010 to ship WVU to the Final Four.
Dead severe.
Certainly what Kellogg did that night time, his teaching efficiency, can be in that very same breath as what Huggins or Beilein achieved of their most wonderful of moments.
And if there was ever a shroud of doubt remaining that Kellogg wasn’t the appropriate man or the appropriate coach or no matter, let these doubts be erased utterly.
He is the appropriate man, the appropriate coach. Today. Tomorrow. For so long as WVU can maintain him round.