The West Virginia Men’s basketball team went through a lot of changes within the coaching staff over the last few months.
With the main one obviously being the resignation of Bob Huggins and promotion of Josh Eilert to the interim role, but with that promotion came an adjustment to the rest of the coaching staff.
Eilert’s new staff consists of DerMarr Johnson, Da’Sean Butler, Alex Ruoff, and Jordan McCabe, with James Dickey serving as a senior advisor.
“We got a young vibrant coaching staff,” said Eilert. “They’re eager to get on the floor everyday, eager to put that individual work with those guys in every day when we have that extra time so it’s been fun. We sit down and meet every morning and get on the same page and I think the guys and the players we got on our roster really feed off that.”
Butler, Ruoff, and McCabe all played for the Mountaineers during their careers, all of which also played for Eilert as he was serving as an assistant to Huggins.
“Three of the four guys that are on the floor everyday they’ve wore the jersey. They’ve wore the old gold and blue, and they know what it means to this state and these people. First and foremost they have equity in the whole process, they want to represent us the right way and that’s huge,” Eilert said.
“When we go out and go through the blue lot with the recruits, I didn’t realize how hard it was going to be for a group of us just to travel. As soon as Da’Sean gets done signing an autograph and taking a picture with some fans, Jordan gets pulled off and then Alex gets pulled off, and DJ [DerMarr] played in the league for eight years so he’s a celebrity himself. We got a good group and I think not only is that our guys on our roster gravitate toward them, I think in the recruiting they really gravitate towards them as well.”
In addition to the off the court stuff, the new assistants have been able to be helpful on the court.
Eilert said the youthfulness of the assistants has helped them during practice, and helped the Mountaineers redesign some of their on-court play.
Noah (Farrakhan’s) first day of practice, I think he had a little bit of a culture shock with the weight room that day. He started cramping up. I didn’t notice he was cramping up but I looked down the floor and that was one of the days we only had 10,” Eilert said. “If one went out, somebody had to replace him. I looked down and Coach Johnson started sprinting down the floor.”
“Da’Sean Butler and I sat down from day one and he’s been a great influence on myself and he spent time in the NBA. We’ve done a lot of things with our spacing and keeping corners filled and keeping the ball in the right hands,” Eilert said of how Butler has helped recreate WVU’s offense. “We’ve put in a lot of sets so far, now we’re looking to put in continuity.”
