With 15 newcomers now enrolled to start their college careers at West Virginia, it will certainly be different than most years in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For the Mountaineers that meant the remaining 14 freshmen from the 2020 recruiting class and the last junior college prospect in offensive lineman Tairiq Stewart preparing to start their careers in Morgantown.

They join the five other scholarship players that enrolled in January giving the program all 20 of the players that signed with the program now integrated with the team.

Voluntary workouts began Monday, the first step in a phased approach that could potentially bring football back in the fall if the suggested proposal by the football oversight committee is followed.

From a mental standpoint, those players could actually be ahead of where most newcomers are typically because they could participate in team and position meetings after showing proof of graduation. That time was spent directed more toward teaching those newcomers.

“Mentally they may be a little bit further ahead,” West Virginia head coach Neal Brown said.

But the challenge will be in other areas such as being physically prepared for the next step. Under a normal circumstance players go through a four-week process when they arrive where they are essentially taught how to be a college student and division one athlete.

That includes teaching them how to lift weights and attack other areas. From there, the newcomers are assimilated into the team but that first month is basically spent by themselves.

“They’re kind of on their own as we bridge them to high school to college and July we focus on getting them in a physical condition and trying to compete against an older group of people,” he said.

Now, some of the physical hurdles can be cleared by what players were doing on their own but there are the challenges of learning how to work out like a college athlete.

That means that players likely won’t be as far along as they would be in a standard year physically, but everybody is on an even playing field. But the fact that the Mountaineers are now

“They don’t know what they don’t know,” Brown said.

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