Just under a month before the official season begins for the WVU Women’s Basketball team, Head Coach Mark Kellogg, in his second year as the Mountaineer Head Coach, is pleased with the practices he’s witnessed as of late. In just under two weeks the team will play one of their two ‘secret scrimmages’ behind close doors against an undisclosed team.
“You want to see the competitive juices when the lights are on so to speak like who can kind of step up and do it…It’s just different when you play someone else,” Kellogg stated at Tuesday’s media availability.
Kellogg mentioned the team has been playing against their male practice team at times during this off-season but the opportunity to get a different look against a different team can serve a big purpose moving forward.
“Just to see a different look because they will do things differently what than we do. When you go against each other every day and running kind of the same stuff, it gets a little harder to gauge it at times. We’ll have a quality opponent and get to see the kids play.”
While the secret scrimmages will take place like a live game for the most part, coaches also have the ability to come together and run what they want to see teams run. Since it’s not an exhibition game, Kellogg says that coaches at times can ask to run certain situations to help prepare the team more.
“Maybe on the back end that’s what those scrimmages are for where you could say ‘oh hey we didn’t get to see enough of this coach, could you give me a few minutes of this.'”
The team that WVU will play against will not be public at this time but Kellogg is sure to reach out to the opposing coach in the near future to figure out just how both teams want to run the scrimmage.
“I haven’t talked to Coach yet to see what we want to do because you can build it sometimes. We might do half court possessions before we get started just to work on it. And then you’ll play a full game and then there may be even some situation like there is seven seconds left and a free throw situation.”
One thing is for certain is that Kellogg will break the scrimmage down to exactly what his team needs. While they might not get the routine of a game day in the Coliseum in front of fans before the start of the season, the game experience and situational knowledge is much more important in the coach’s eyes.
“We’ve done all sorts of different things. We’ve done where you just start with a half court and then come back in a full court and just stop it there. We’ve run let’s just play man for these five possessions where your team runs for five possessions and then you flip. You can work on baseline out of bounds offense and defense. You can really break it down however you want.”
