WVU women’s basketball, Plitzuweit begin again
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MORGANTOWN-- Starting over.
We've all done it. New job. New home. New school. New love affair.
Two years ago Chris Stapleton recorded a country song carrying the title "Starting Over".
The chorus went this way:
And it don't matter to me
Wherever we are is where i wanna be
And honey, for once in or life
Let's take our chances and roll the dice
And I can be your lucky penny
You can be my four-leaf clover
Starting over
You might excuse West Virginia's new women's basketball coach, Dawn Piltzuweit, if she's singing it in the shower, humming it working out or simply thinking about it 24 hours a day, for that is just what she's doing.
She had a nice comfortable job at South Dakota, where she's been for six seasons, winning 81.4% of her games and 89.2% of her Summit Conference games.
But she got the itch to move on -- and up. WVU called and that's Big 12, Power 5, basketball. And, what the hell, she'd started over before so many times … at Michigan Tech, Wisconsin, Green Bay, Grand Valley State, Michigan (where she was women's associate head coach when former WVU men's coach John Beilein was putting together at Final Four team for the Wolverines), Northern Kentucky, then South Dakota.
Why not start over again? That's the college game today, transfer here, transfer there. If players can do it, why not coaches?
So, this week they began organized practices and she had so much to learn about her players, who had so much to learn from her.
Her game is not Mike Carey's game, the coach she replaced. In fact, her game is more John Beilein's, but mostly it's really nobody else's game.
Oh, she was smart enough to study Beilein's game when she could.
"I do think there are a lot of similarities in terms of how we break things down and we touch and how we simplify things," she said. "We don't use his exact terminology, but it was interesting watching his practices."
She watched and she listened.
"He would tell his guys, not exactly, but we're gong to play hockey and after hockey we're playing baseball and then the quarterback is going to throw it. I'm thinking, what is he talking about?" she admitted.
"But his guys knew exactly what it meant. Baseball means this, and hockey meant this and it was simplified for his players. We have tried to do that to the best of our ability, so they can understand."
The idea is to arrive at what she wants.
"The bottom line is, if we have great spacing offensively, then we get some movement that's hard to guard, and we have players who can score from different ways, we're not really doing anything that's complicated. we're just trying to play basic, simple, fundamental basketball and make reads. That can be really challenging to guard." she said.
She's looking for versatility, athleticism and, maybe most of all, basketball smarts.
"All of our players are built on their versatility of being able to do a little bit of everything," Plitzuweit said. "That can be fun for a lot of players, because the smaller players all want to post up and the bigger players all want to shoot threes. What that means is we have to continue to develop versatility in all our players."
And the basketball smarts?
She believes, as Beilein did, that the smarter the player, the better he or she runs the system.
In the final analysis she wants a team that is versatile, plays smart and plays fast.
"Everyone wants to play fast and we have some speed, so why not?" Plitzuweit said. "There's some similarities with other teams in the Big 12 that want to space the floor and attack and shoot 3s. We want to be able to do that, but also to attack inside, so it's a little bit different."
The big problem she has starting over right now is she doesn't have a proven big player in a league that will offer a lot of altitude challenges.
Still, she believes in her style of play.
"With our style of play, we can make that work," she said. "The bottom line is, can we get the ball arond the rim and score it efficiently enough and can we limit good opportunities at the rim on the other end? Are we tough enough, even though we may be a little bit smaller? That's the challenge."
In the end, that's what starting over is, challenges so you just keep looking for that lucky penny or four-leaf clover.