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Photo courtesy of BlueGoldNews.com
West Virginia interim head coach Josh Eilert watches a free throw in the late going of the win over Cincinnati.
MORGANTOWN –Waves.
That’s what comes to Josh Eilert’s mind the most as his season as interim coach of basketball replacing the legend that was Bob Huggins turns the corner and begins the second half of its Big 12 season at 3 p.m. today in Austin.
He sees himself as someone wading off into the Atlantic Ocean as huge breakers keep knocking him back. The water gets deeper and more dangerous as he tries to move forward, and only now does he feel that maybe, hopefully, he can find smooth sailing.
It may be too late to turn the interim status into a permanent position, or as permanent as any job is in college basketball these days, which may be a shame but isn’t a sham. He didn’t have any chance to succeed as it played out, but who would have?
“Certainly, we wish it would have played out differently from the jump,” Eilert said during a Thursday ZOOM call preceding the journey to Texas, a team looking for revenge, and TCU. “That wasn’t the case. We made the most of it and now we’re trying to make the most of the last nine, 10 games of the season. We’re trying to make some waves from our own standpoint moving forward.”
Waves.
It started with the departure of Huggins and the offer to try and rescue the program, but the waves began rolling in.
A rash of transfers was first, then the season started and the NCAA had already denied RaeQuan Battle his transfer waiver, a wrong that wasn’t fixed until nine games into the season. At the same time, it came out that point guard Kerr Kriisa would have to sit out nine games of suspension for illegal benefits received at Arizona.
The look of the team he thought he had inherited changed dramatically. It had to change, to rely solely on his one star player left, Jesse Edwards, but just as the two NCAA shackled players were freed, Edwards broke his right wrist.
Another wave.
The losses grew; losses a WVU basketball team is not used to suffering.
Yet he didn’t complain. He refused to play the victim and told his players that was off limits, too. He handled the situation gallantly, but the Big 12 is hardly a wave pool at a local amusement park. You play with sharks in there.
“Many times I’ve had to change my train of thought in terms of my coaching approach based on our situation,” he said. “We didn’t get into a groove like every other team that had their roster set in May, took their team on a foreign tour and settled into a groove early. We didn’t have that opportunity by any means.”
It was “Mission: Impossible” but there was no Tom Cruise around to save the day.
But he has no regrets about accepting the job and would do it all over again if given the one thing you seldom get in life, a do-over.
“Oh, absolutely. I remember Joe Mazzulla telling me how tough the situation is but understand, you’re playing with house money. You get an opportunity to be a head coach. That’s the way you have to look a it,” he said.
“It’s been a complete challenge in every sense of the word, but it’s where individuals come out with more growth.”
He senses that now that his roster is complete and they’ve had some time to play a couple of games together, things are improving.
“Every day for me it becomes more rewarding, and it slows down a little bit,” he said. “We’re in the middle of conference play now, but the huge waves have started to settle. Early in the process, it felt like you were being hit with huge wave after huge wave.
“We were all new to this. I was a first-year head coach, I had four guys who were basically new to being assistant coaches, so we were building that chemistry between our staff while trying to navigate all the changes we had to navigate.
“Now the waves have started to calm a little bit, and we’re settling into the position. It just so happened that all these things occurred so fast and we were trying to manage this high-stress situation early in our careers.
“I’d say, more than anything, it’s starting to calm a bit and we’re starting to settle into our positions and certainly I wish it would have played out a little differently from the jump. I wish we’d had our whole roster, but that wasn’t the case, so we made the most of it and now we’re trying to make the most of it over the last 9 or 10 games of the season.”
He’s hoping to salvage enough out of the season to avoid the last wave … the wave goodbye.
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