File photo WVU’s Gia Cooke drives to the basket against Cincinnati last season.

MORGANTOWN — How many times had Mark Kellogg done this before, stood there in the middle of a basketball court, running a women’s basketball team through its opening drills on a new season?

So many that it should have been old hat with him as he got into workouts for West Virginia’s women’s team aimed at the 2026-27 season.

“You go here. You go there. Block out. No, first option is here, not there!”

But this was different and the reminder of how different it was being placed above the door to the women’s court at the West Virginia Basketball Practice Facility as they went at it, a worker high on a ladder adding the sign that proclaimed them winners of the 2026 Big 12 Tournament on their home court.

But that wasn’t all that was different.

Jordan Harrison wasn’t running the team at the point guard position. She’d been there for 134 of the 135 games Kellogg had coached over the last four years, starting every one of them while his teams had compiled a 105-30 record, which is a .778 winning percentage.

He’d recruited her at Stephen F. Austin and she’d followed him from there to WVU, where she ran the show on the floor for three years … and now she was gone, a professional player and Kellogg was starting over.

One player who had played — Gia Cooke — returned from that championship team that had won over the imagination of the Big 12, that had sold out the Coliseum for two rounds of the NCAA women’s tournament.

It was now Cooke’s team and it included only one other returning player, redshirt Madison Parrish, who is expected to blossom into a starter, but Kellogg was in the midst of putting the pieces together with a new roster of freshmen and transfers that would give it a new look.

“It worked out great and we feel great about it,” he said of the new roster that he has compiled that has three Canadians, two former Pitt players and one from Duquesne in Alexis Bordas, who is from Wheeling Park High in West Virginia, another who is at her fourth school, two from George Mason, a couple of Big 12 transfers in UCF’s Khyala Ngodu and BYU transfer Marya Hudgins.

“When you are going through it, you just don’t know. There’s too many unknowns,” Kellogg added. “We had two kids coming back. We thought we had a couple more that were going to come back initially. Then, they made some decisions to go a different direction. We had a kid leave, and I think in 48 hours we had another kid on campus and committed.”

It is the world we live in now.

“I think we have versatility; we can defend; we’ve got multiple positions players,” he said. “So far it’s been really good. I think we’re checking all the boxes now in recruiting with what they are looking for.

“I want to play in a winning program. Check. I want to play in front of fans. Check. I want to be coached. Check. Can you produce pros? Check, Jordan Harrison and JJ Quinerly were playing in the WNBA. OK, check.”

There was one point where he went through 18 hectic days where everything kept changing, which had him sitting in front of his computer with six different spread sheets looking at possibilities, trying to mix and match to get what he wanted out of recruiting.

But laying over it all was the idea that he had coached one game in four years without Jordan Harrison at the point and that presented itself as an exclamation point on just how much things were changing.

“I’ve had to do a lot of things different,” Kellogg admitted. “Jordan was phenomenal and we grew so much together in our four years. That’s natural, though. This is not the first time we’ve graduated a point guard that we had to fill.

“We had to find a new one who can fill that role. It will not be Jordan Harrison. It will be different than that. We’ll find it. We always have. I think we have a lot of options.”

Harrison was unique in that she put not only the style that Kellogg wants to play on the court, but the attitude. She was defense first, understood that the offense started out of the defense, ran the court and ran the show.

One option that stood out during the practice was that Cooke ran some at the point guard.

“I’m going to play more on the ball this year,” she said. “We got a lot of good people so we can push the ball down the court. I’m super excited about that, showing a different role this year and working on my game and being a coach on the floor.”

She averaged 15 points a game playing off the ball last season, high on the team, and seemed content in her role but she appears to have accepted the fact that as the lone returning player from the Big 12 Championship team, her presence will be looked toward for leadership.

“I’ve been there, done that,” she said of the role she has to play. “I have to make sure we stay grounded and keep everyone from becoming frustrated learning a whole new system and stuff like that. I don’t want anyone to feel lost so I try be really open to questions and just keep talking to the girls to try and pick them up.”

She says it seems to be working.

“We have a whole lot of togetherness right now I appreciate that with it being a whole new team,” Cooke said. “I think we’ll be fine. Frustrations are going to come. That’s what happens with a new team but we will learn from it and be fine from there.”