Junior college recruiting a part of the success formula for Huggins

Two of the leading scorers on the West Virginia basketball roster come from the junior college ranks in guards Taz Sherman and Sean McNeil.

If you’ve followed the career path of head coach Bob Huggins that should come as no surprise.

Huggins has always dipped into the junior college ranks from his time at Cincinnati to his return to Morgantown. During his time with the Mountaineers, he has had players such as Jaysean Paige, Tarik Phillip, Jonathan Holton, Jermaine Haley and Casey Mitchell all come from that talent pool.

It’s something that he has relied on for a long time and began in an honest enough way.

“I started recruiting junior college guys at Cincinnati because I couldn’t get any high school guys,” Huggins said. “We tried like crazy to recruit some high school guys and couldn’t get any.”

During the early stages of his time with the Bearcats Huggins brought in players from those ranks such as Corie Blount (Santa Ana College), Erik Martin (Santa Ana College) and Nick Van Exel (Trinity Valley Community College) and Herb Jones (Butler County Community College).

Each of which played a significant role.

“I had a buddy who worked a lot of camps with me when I was younger that said there’s these three guys out here you want to take a look at, and he sent me their names and so forth it,” Huggins said.

That’s when Huggins sent assistant Steve Moeller, who recruited California, to see them. The response was one that made the decision to recruit from that level an easy one.

“He went out and said, ‘these guys can really, really come in and help us’,” Huggins recalled.

Huggins has taken to the older, more seasoned junior college recruits in large part because of that maturity. They have already seen more of the world and also are more physically developed. There are a lot of different reasons why a player could end up at that level as well and it leads to plenty of interesting stories.

It has to fit with the needs of the roster and on the team, but as long as they check those boxes, can play and can handle the college workload it made sense to go that direction.

“The ones I had were great. I probably had 15-20 of them that went on and had great careers after they left us,” Huggins said.

It’s a tactic that Huggins continues to use to this day and has found plenty of positive results in Morgantown as well although it does sometimes take a year for those players to find themselves. Both Sherman and McNeil are prime examples of that after struggling in their first seasons before emerging with improved totals across the board in their second year with the Mountaineers.

“I think I relate to them. They’ve seen a lot more than a guy coming out of high school. I think you put the time in and get to know them and put the time in to see where they’re coming from,” he said. “You listen to them. The biggest thing is you coach them. Guys really deep down in want to be coached.”

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