West Virginia men’s basketball interim head coach Josh Eilert knew he had to change on the defensive end. They did that on Saturday and it led to a win against No. 25 Texas. Now, it’s about repeating that for the Mountaineers.
West Virginia’s defense held Texas to a season low 28 first half points, a number that only Marquette has also held the Longhorns to in the first half.
“We haven’t been a great defensive team by any means,” said Eilert. “We’ve had challenges, we’ve thrown zones out there and done everything we can to figure out how we shore that up so I think we’re going in a good direction based on our personnel now, it’s something we can hang our hat on defensively and hopefully we can build on that because it is a pretty big change from what we were doing in the past.”
Josh Eilert credited the coaching staff, saying they presented this new defensive scheme to him that helped lead to the win over the Longhorns.
“Credit to our staff, our staff came to the table and presented a different defensive scheme and they said ‘we all met and figured out how we can implement it effectively on the fly.’ It’s hard to do those things when you have two-day prep and you don’t have much of a window to make changes so credit to our staff for bringing that to the table and executing it on the floor.”
When talking about the coaches who have helped the most in bringing in new ideas for how to play better help defense and better defense in the paint, Eilert pointed to coaches Jordan McCabe and Alex Ruoff.
“I would give the majority of the credit to coach McCabe and coach Ruoff. Coach Ruoff, I would say his attention to detail is higher than probably anybody in our staff and that’s a great trait to have when you’re coaching defense. Jordan came up with a lot of the concepts as well and brought it to the table and we kind of tagged coach Ruoff with that opportunity to kind of shore up a lot of this defense.”
Eilert then said Ruoff in the last few days has taken over much of the defensive coaching, calling him his “defensive coordinator.”
“When you got good people behind you and you can trust them without putting an official tag, I just said ‘coach Ruoff, you’re my defensive coordinator so to speak, anybody got questions with what we’re doing defensively go to coach Ruoff.’ He’s taken on that role in that last three or four days and has done an excellent job with it and we’ll continue to go to him to shore up some of those defensive efficiencies.”
