Photo courtesy of BlueGoldNews.com Darian DeVries was officially introduced as the WVU men’s basketball coach on March 24 of this year.

MORGANTOWN — If the hiring of Rich Rodriguez to straighten out the West Virginia football situation is the No. 1 story of an intriguing 2024, then surely the hiring of Darian DeVries cannot be far behind and it isn’t, as we rank it the No. 3 story of the year.

In most ways, it is fair to say that the basketball situation was more of a mess than the football situation, giving the cloud under which Hall of Fame coach Bob Huggins had been driven from his job and the timing where athletic director Wren Baker was thrust into a search for his replacement.

The timing left the list of candidates short in 2023 so Baker, rather than jump to someone he really wasn’t sold on, decided to promote Josh Eilert as a yearlong interim coach while he did a thorough search.’

The interim appointment had everything go wrong and produced the most losses in any season in the history of the program but it allowed Baker to settle upon Darian DeVries of Drake as the proper choice to rescue the Mountaineer program and reestablish all the history that came with it, including the legends of Jerry West, Rod Hudley and Ron Thorn.

On March 24, 2024 Baker welcomed DeVries as the 23rd coach in school history.

This was not a big name hire but it was a well thought out one, just as had been his hire the previous year of Mark Kellogg as women’s coach.

From 2014-15 to 2016-17 Drake had gone 23-70 before a .500 season of 17-17 under one-year coach Niko Medved and from 1970-71 until DeVries was hired away from Creighton in 2018-19, where he had been an assistant for 17 years, Drake had recorded 20 wins just once.

DeVries came in and turned the program upside down, winning 20 or more games in six consecutive seasons and three times reaching the NCAA Tournament.

He was ready to test himself against Power 4 teams and when Baker looked into him he offered up everything he wanted, even having a son with one year’s eligibility left who had averaged more than 20 points a game and was a team leader.

His one interaction with WVU was being an assistant when WVU beat Drake on Tyrone Sally’s dunk on a fastbreak on the final play of a 63-61 Mountaineer victory in 2005.

With Mike Gansey of that WVU team and now serves as general manager of the Cleveland Cavaliers as one of his backers, DeVries won over Baker on every level.

The only basketball player out of a family of football players, one of whom reached the NFL, DeVries has come in and gotten the Mountaineer off a strong start with a 9-2 record, as many wins as last year’s team had all season as they head into Big 12 play against Kansas on New Year’s Eve.’

He’s done it by reconstructing the entire roster and has been the surprise team of the Big 12 to date.

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No. 4

WVU Cross

country team

Sean Cleary has coached track and cross country at WVU finished his 18th season as head coach of the Mountaineers and his coaching career goes back more than 30 years at the school, beginning as a graduate assistant.

He had coached a number of great athletes in women’s track and cross country but knew this year’s cross country team, led by All-American Ceili McCabe, a redshirt graduate student and an Olympic 3,000-meter steeplechase star, would be one of his best teams.

But what awaited him proved to be more than he could have expected as the Mountaineers became national NCAA runners-up, beaten out only by Big 12 rival BYU, who won both the NCAA men’s and women’s crowns.

McCabe was joined by freshman Joy Naukot of Kenya to lift the Mountaineers they’d never reached before in the sport.

McCabe became the Big 12’s women’s runner of the year while Naukot was the conference’s freshman of the year and figures to carry oThn in McCabe’s footsteps moving forward.

McCabe’s season included a third Big 12 championship in her career, then she added a third NCAA Mid-Atlantic Regional title in person and course-record time of 19:02.60 and then she capped the year finishing sixth in the Big Big 12 meet to her ninth first team All-America honor.

In the NCAA runner up performance, Naukot was the top freshman runner in the nation, finishing 17th .

“If I had one word to describe today’s performance, I would choose spectacular,” Cleary said after the championship. “I am so very proud of this team, and all they have accomplished. As we watched the team move through this field to finally emerge with a second-place finish, it completes the finest season in program history.”

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No. 5

Building rosters

This has become a never-ending story in college sports today and as the year ends it is in full swing as the system moves away from NIL and trusts to a revenue sharing program that will involve WVU paying out in the neighborhood of $20 million in money to its athletes.

With this new system being introduced and with the transfer portal swallowing up and spitting out athletes almost as fast as coaches can bring them into being, the best thing that may come of it is that program sales will skyrocket as it will really be true that you can’t tell the players without a program.

Right now, the WVU football team is undergoing a complete restructuring as Rich Rodriguez starts from scratch. As Christmas arrived, the only true offensive starter left on the team between graduation and the transfer portal was running back Jahiem White, which is a good place to start .

But with quarterback Garrett Greene and consensus All-American tackle graduating Wyatt Milum graduating and the likes of running back CJ Donaldson, wide receiver Hudson Clement and offensive guard Tomas Rimac transferring, Rodriguez was really back where he started in 2000 when he took over from Don Nehlen.

“Not surprising,” he said. “I mean, college football has changed so much. A lot of times, guys go in the portal because they want to see what their value is. Some guys want to go because they want an opportunity to play more. And some guys go, and they don’t know what the hell they want to do. I think sometime over the next year or two there will be some sanity put into college athletics.

Rodriguez spoke with them and offered the reasons they should stay, but he was leaving it up to them.

“I’m not going to beg them, I’m going to tell them this is what we’re going to do; we’re going to be in a great position to help them not just career-wise, football-wise, academically, but financially. But if they are going to chase the money and some school is going to pay them big, big money, more money that we would pay, and they decide to do that, that’s fine. I’ll get another one. I don’t panic about it”

While Nicco Marchiol is not the ideal Rodriguez quarterback, Rich Rod figures to be leaning that direction unless a more Pat White-like figure transfers in.

And there are no complaints that nearly the entire defense has to be rebuilt.

DeVries was in an even worse situation when he took over as he had only one returning player from last year’s team staying in basketball, Ofri Naveh, the Israeli import, but he wound up redshirting this year so DeVries wound up putting together a team from scratch.

While building up a 9-2 record heading toward Big 12 play, it turned out that he had chosen wisely as Javon Small, a transfer from Oklahoma State, has taken over a star role and is threatening to become the first player two decades to average 20 points a game, averaging 19.7 at present.

An injury to his son, Tucker DeVries, the Missouri Valley Conference Player of the Year from last year, has been crippling but he may return.

Meanwhile, with transfers from near and far fitting into what he needed nicely and with a pair of freshmen guards — Jonathan Powell and KJ Tenner — he has gerrymandered a competitive team that believes in itself and that could engineer a surprise in the Big 12 right away.

“I really like the way it has come together,” he said on a podcast in midsummer. “It took us a while to get going as we were putting the staff together and getting our roster started through the portal and things; I think we’ve got great chemistry.

“I think the pieces all fit well together, so I think we will have an opportunity to have a very competitive team, and a team that I know is hungry with a lot of guys that are looking forward to the challenges that they are going to see every night.”

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No. 6

Baseball coaching

transition

The sixth top story of the year in WVU sports was both a new story and an old one because that’s the way they wanted it to be.

Randy Mazey had set up a smooth transition into an early retirement after having taken over a broken program and brought it back to prominence, announcing last year that he was leaving while his nine-year assistant Steve Sabins would be a coach in waiting.

Mazey had seen the Mountaineers come into the Big 12 and become a force in one of the country’s great baseball conferences, had engineered its move into a new, beautiful ballpark, had watched his children grow in his adopted town of Morgantown and had gone out the right way, with the team in a Super Regional of the NCAA Tournament, losing his final game, 2-1 to North Carolina.

“I told the guys who were in that huddle out there with me, in 35 years of coaching that’s the team I want to end my career with. I love every one of them and I think they know that,” he said at the time.

He had created a culture, not a team. He had handled them all as if they were his own kids, built them from underdog to respect.

“I’d much rather coach a program that’s an underdog than a favorite,” he said “It’s been so much fun. The 12 years have been … ”

He took a moment to wipe away tears as he spoke

“These 12 years have been unbelievable. I told the guys going into this season, ‘Don’t try and put statistical goals on yourself. Don’t try to hit .300 or win 10 games. Your goal should be every year to exceed expectations and we’ve done that.”

And with that, he was ready to turn the team over to Sabins.

“Personally, people say ‘Leave something better than you found it.’ Well, I can feel good moving on in my career that we have made 18 million people in the state of West Virginia proud of this program. I wouldn’t, in any way, shape or form take credit for that. I’m smart enough to surround myself with good people and that’s been the secret sauce. It’s been the people.”

And with that, the team became Sabins, never before a head coach, to take over and move forward.

“I think my role and responsibility as a head coach is to bring the most badass staff and players in the world to the door and let them do their thing,” Sabins said. “He’s given me so much responsibility throughout the years and I’ve been able to grow in those other areas, this year especially

“I knew that I needed to be ready in a lot of areas if we wanted to have a seamless transition and so it’s been a learning year and we’ve been able to win on top of it, which is just unbelievable. That was the cherry on top.”

Now, as the year ends, it’s his team and it’s important he keeps it moving in the right direction.

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No. 7

Mazzulla wins the

NBA title in Boston

This may be the ultimate “Yes, I can … Yes, I can … Yes, I can” story of all time.

You know the tale, the little train that comes across the big hill and huffs and puffs until he gets to the top.

Well, Joe Mazzulla’s exploits at WVU. While he was hardly a star player, he was the blood and guts of a team that went to the Final Four, dragging his left arm behind him. Playing only because of an injury to Truck Bryant, he had the game of his lifetime against Kentucky to get to the Final Four on a team that was filled with talent led by Da’Sean Butler.

He went into coaching, paid his dues at the lower levels, working his way up from Fairmont State, always with an eye on the NBA. He wasn’t talented enough to play there but he studied his craft, worked at his craft, coached in the G League, and, on September 22, 2022, when the Celtics coach Ime Udoka was suspended for the season just days before training camp opened, Mazzulla was named interim coach.

The first season was a dream come true. He won NBA East Conference Coach of the Month for November after opening the season 18-4, was named to coach Team Giannis in the 2023 NBA All-Star game, in February was signed as the 19th head coach in the legendary history of the Celtics, got a No. 2 seed in the playoffs and went seven games despite losing the first three to the Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference Finals.

Then, last year, he coached the Celtics to a league-leading 64-18 record for the No. 1 seed in the playoffs, beat Miami and Cleveland in the first two rounds, swept Indiana in four games in the Eastern Finals at age 35 to become the youngest coach since Bill Russell in 1969.

His Celtics then roared by the Dallas Mavericks to win the NBA Finals, making him the youngest coach to win a title in more than 50 years.

“I think when you have great players and have guys that have 17 years in the league guys who have been to the finals, that have been coached by other great coaches and been part of other systems, you have Jrue [Holliday] and all these players with other experience, it’s nothing more than just facilitating You have to allow the guys to set the temperature of the organization on a daily basis and then you just have to facilitate and fill in the gaps from time to time, depending on where people are at,” he said modestly.

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No. 8

Men’s soccer reaches

No 1

It was a year that deserved a better finish for WVU’s men’s soccer team.

For the first time in the sports history, WVU’s men were voted the No 1 team in the nation but, in the end, they did not get the respect they thought they deserved from the NCAA seeding committee and wound up being eliminated in the second round by Virginia in a 2-1 game they dominated but had to pay on the road.

It was September 3, 2024 when the Mountaineers first landed in the No 1 spot by the United Soccer coaches and Top Drawer Soccer, the culmination of Coach Dan Stratford’s building of the program he once played for. A year earlier, in mid-September and late October, the team had reached No. 2 in the coaches’ poll for the first time.

Being No. 1 is a rare honor at WVU. The rifle team has been a 19-tie NCAA champion. Nikki Izzo-Brown’s women’s program had reached No. 1 in 2017 following a national runner-up performance the previous year. In that 2016 season, they had spent five different weeks at No. 1 in the poll.

Rich Rodriguez’s 2007 ill-fated football team reached No. 1 in the USAToday Coaches’ Poll the last week of the regular season before falling to Pitt.

And Jerry West’s 1957-58 Mountaineers spent 8 weeks at No. 1 in the AP poll, including the final poll on March 11, 1958, but lost in overtime to California in the NCAA semifinal.

The 2024 Mountaineers remained unbeaten until mid-October when they were upset by Dayton, 2-1, the Flyers’ only victory over a No. 1 team.

Come tournament time, however, WVU could not earn a No. 16 seed in the tournament, which sent them to Virginia where they lost a 2-1 decision despite holding a 16-5 edge in shots and a 5-2 advantage in shots on goal.

The Mountaineers finished the season with a 13-2-7 record, and Stratford was not happy with the selection process.

“The body of work in the fourth-best conference in the country, when you win the title and then go on and win the tournament title, I expected that would be enough,” a clearly upset Stratford said. “There is a mathematical algorithm for this, and I would prefer that we just stick to it. I’m sure that we’re not the only team that feels outdone by today.”

There were individual honors to go around as Sergio Ors Navarro and Max Broughton were named All-Americans by the United Soccer Coaches, the 15th and 16th players at the school to be so honored. Navarro was named to the first team, Broughton to the second.

And WVU’s Ryan Baer was the 28th overall pick in the first round of the 2025 MLS SuperDraft by the Seattle Sounders, the fourth Mountaineer to be picked in the first round in the last two years.