Now healthy, McNeil looking to write next chapter with West Virginia

Sean McNeil hasn’t been able to catch a break since arriving in Morgantown in June.

There has been an extended illness, a concussion, a hamstring injury and even his brother’s wedding which have kept him off the court for periods of time in the past several months.

The junior college prospect fell ill on the trip to Spain after eating a piece of chicken. That led him losing some weight and not being able to play the game as he recovered from it.

Then after battling back from that in mid-October, he caught an unintentional elbow from Jermaine Haley in the eye during practice that forced him into the concussion protocol. All the while he had been battling a nagging hamstring issue that had limited his effectiveness.

“It’s been a crazy summer,” he said.

But McNeil returned to full-go just recently and has started to pick up the pieces after coming in as a highly regarded, and efficient scorer at the junior college level.

“With all the things going on it was really hard for him to get back to 100-percent health. It just happened maybe in the last week and a half, he’s been kind of full go,” head coach Bob Huggins said. “I think he’s got a great future here.”

The rare junior college prospect with three full seasons of eligibility remaining, overcoming adversity is nothing new for the Kentucky native. His path to Morgantown, and really division one basketball as a whole, was far from a straight line.

That’s because only a few years ago, McNeil was out of basketball altogether after first signing with a division two school and then deciding to leave the program.

The scoring guard then enrolled at a local community college that didn’t even have a basketball program where he realized it was now or never for him. So McNeil started to work on the aspects of his game that were lacking during that year before eventually enrolling at Sinclair C.C.

“I had that year to really work on my game and focus on what I wasn’t doing well and that was really off the bounce. That’s what I really worked on and doing that a whole year that I had off and then going into JUCO I felt a lot more comfortable,” he said. “And the work shows.”

That it did as McNeil developed into one of the highest scoring guards at his level and garnered scholarship offers from 19 programs after averaging close to 30-points per game. While he had added some new weapons to his arsenal shooting had always been a strong suit. He shot close to 43-percent from three during his season at Sinclair.

There’s a good reason for that, too.

“I’ve been a shooter since I was a little kid and I say that because I was chubby. I couldn’t do anything else but shoot so my dad kind of taught me how to shoot and got me going with the game of basketball,” McNeil recalled his past.

That touch and then added ability to create his own shot made McNeil a priority for Huggins and he was able to wrestle him away from the grasps of several other high-major programs. The message was clear, the Mountaineers needed guards that could shoot and create off the bounce. McNeil can do both.

Huggins wasn’t asking for him to do anything outside his comfort zone and that was appealing.

His ability to score the ball was evident in the exhibition game where McNeil finished with 12 points, including a pair of threes. But where he caught the eye of his head coach wasn’t with the basketball at all considering that he recruited him to be able to do those things.

“He’s going to score points and I thought he was better defensively. I thought he was way better defensively than he’s been,” Huggins said.

McNeil is excited for what can come next as well, with hopefully the bad news behind him. Now close to fully healthy outside the bumps and bruises that come with playing at this level, he is read to soak up as much as he can before the Mountaineers begin their season.

It hasn’t been a conventional beginning for McNeil in Morgantown but just another chapter to his story which continues to serve as a reminder of how far he’s come.

A journey that’s brought him back to the game he loves.

“I didn’t know where I was going to end up but I knew I was going to play somewhere,” McNeil said. “I had too much love for the game.”

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