Submitted photo WVU’s Jordan Harrison plays defense during a summer practice session.

MORGANTOWN — As the doors to court on the women’s side of the West Virginia University basketball practice facility, Mark Kellogg has his team deep into summer practice.

It is a scrimmage as he puts in offense and defense in periods of three minutes, up and down at breakneck speed, sneakers squealing even louder than his whistle when he blows it to make a point.

This is Kellogg’s third season coming up after a pair of 25-8 years in which he established that the Mountaineer women will pressure on defense, run on offense and are now part of the higher ranks of a sport that is growing in popularity not only in West Virginia, but around the country.

This is his first year without JJ Quinerly, whose quickness, speed and relentless approach to the game fit his model to a T, leading her into the WNBA, which is at the forefront of that popularity burst as personified in Caitlin Clark, looking to expand and with its players looking for a move toward equality in pay to the NBA for its players.

With injuries clearing playing time for her, she has averaged 14.6 points over her last five games while playing from 20 to 30 minutes each night, clearing up any doubt whether at 5-foot-8 she could play for the Dallas Wings in the league.

“Speed and quickness are dangerous if you know how to use it,” Kellogg said of Quinerly’s ability to adapt to the highest league in women’s basketball. “JJ has known how to use her quickness for quite some time and it’s showing against some of the elite WNBA talent. Her speed is a difference maker.”

She, of course, was at the warhead in the explosion of popularity for the women’s game at WVU, which pinnacled in an NCAA playoff game against Clark and her Iowa teammates, a game that was a loss but one that helped sell the world on what WVU was doing in the women’s game.

“You’re still asking about it, so I guess it was pretty important,” Kellogg said of that game as a turning point. “We got some eyes on us that night. There were 4 million — or whatever it was — people who tuned in to watch Mountaineer women’s basketball.

“We still make recruiting calls and there’s still a lot of kids and families who watched that game,” Kellogg continued. “I thought we represented the right way. We are building off of that, off of last year, off the North Carolina loss last year and the wins we’ve had in the NCAA Tournament along the way.”

The style of play, the relentless pressure, is what makes WVU women’s basketball different and that was evident as they took a break between periods when one of Kellogg’s assistant coaches called one of the players aside and explained what WVU women’s basketball is like.

“You can look tired, but don’t play tired,” she said.

That speed of the game now is fully turned over to Jordan Harrison, even smaller than Quinerly, maybe quicker, and it’s her job to see that WVU doesn’t slow anything down this year.

“It’s just reps, getting them comfortable playing at an uncomfortable speed,” Kellogg said. “That’s what we are trying to do to opponents.”

And it works.

Texas Tech transfer Loghan Johnson explained what it’s like playing against the WVU pressure last year.

“Being on the opposite end of it, you spend the whole week prepping for it. Then you get in it and you are here in the Coliseum, it is just completely different when you are under that pressure. That’s something I always commended West Virginia on. I am really excited to now be a part of it, take my defensive prowess and add it into the system,” Johnson said.

And so WVU is beginning to put that in with a different group, Kellogg saying its the first time he’s ever had more newcomers than holdovers.

The biggest hole, though, is Quinerly’s, which was felt immediately as this year’s practice began.

“When [Quinerly] got drafted, it really hit me. That’s when there was some finality to it.,” Kellogg said. “There’s been times and we even said when we were doing our stretching in the first two practices — they always kind of stretch in the same spot and you look and there is no JJ, there’s no Kya Watson. There’s a different look; a different feel.”

“With [Quinerly] being such a big part of the team, you feel that hole missing,” said holdover Sydney Shaw. “But I feel like we’re doing a good job of filling it up. She is doing great where she is and I am supporting her from here.”

The hole is a large one but Kellogg isn’t looking to replace the player that was Quinerly, just the production.

“You replace points, you replace certain things,” he said. “You do that every year. You lose players. Yes, JJ was a very talented kid. It’s some of the other intangibles, the on-the-ball defense, the calmness late in the game where we had a player late in the game we could go to and she’d make a play and be the best player on the floor.

“You try to talk through that, to try and overcome and wonder ‘Who is going to do this for us now?’ Yeah, JJ scored 20 points a game, but we’ll spread that out and cover it. It won’t be one person, but we’ll figure out how to score and how to defend and someone will figure out how to take her role on defense.”

And so, as football prepares to begin its summer camp this coming week; as the men have gotten into their summer workouts, so, too, has the women’s basketball team and it is the team that is coming off the best season of all of them and that has the biggest hole to fill.

Kellogg is confident it can be done and that bigger and better things are ahead.

“This is the deepest team we have had since we’ve been here. We can go probably ten or eleven deep now, which maybe we haven’t been able to do quite as much in years past,” he said.