It hadn’t been the happiest of New Years for Sean McNeil.
Since the turn of the calendar, the sophomore guard had been 0-7 from the field over the first three games and had mustered only two points from the free throw line in 27-minutes of action.
But shooters, shoot and that’s exactly what the coaches told him to keep doing.
“I got some really good looks my teammates found me. They tell me to continue to shoot the ball that’s what shooters do,” McNeil said. “I was getting really good open looks.”
Two shots into the game against TCU that drought had stretched to 0-9.
But, McNeil was persistent and got his first to drop with 3:35 left in the first half and things started rolling from there. He’d add two more baskets over the remaining portion of the first half to close with his most productive stretch of basketball since the Nicholls match up in mid-December.
Even when the ball isn’t falling, the message is clear to McNeil. Shooting is what he was recruited to do after the Mountaineers struggled to find any consistency in that department a season ago. The Mountaineers ranked dead last in the Big 12 in three-point shooting at 31.6-percent and brought in the Kentucky native who had shown a knack for shots at Sinclair C.C.
There McNeil hit 43-percent of his shots from deep and averaged 29.7 points per game, drawing interest from a long list of schools including Texas Tech, Dayton, Mississippi and others. The draw of playing for the Mountaineers was something that McNeil didn’t want to pass up with the need for shooters.
“We recruited Sean because he made shots and we went through a year where we couldn’t make shots,” head coach Bob Huggins said. “We thought he was a guy that could consistently come in and give us a guy on the perimeter that they had to guard.”
To date, McNeil has provided a spark from deep averaging the most per game and hitting 39-percent of his attempts on the year, a mark good for second on the team behind only Miles McBride. Sometimes all it takes is one to go down to start a positive shift and McNeil believes that could be the case here.
Regardless, the Mountaineers are a better team when McNeil or his counterparts are hitting shots on the outside and forcing the defense to respect them.
“Seeing that one go in is a huge confidence boost,” he said.
And perhaps it’s the start to a better 2020 than the beginning was for the sophomore guard.
WATCH: Musings from the Mountains | West Virginia Football | Episode 57
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