The roster reconstruction for West Virginia is now officially underway.
That’s because new head coach Ross Hodge added the first piece out of the transfer portal with a commitment from UNC Wilmington center Harlan Obioha.
Obioha, 7-foot-0, 280-pounds, attracted plenty of interest once he entered the transfer market from schools such as Texas, Cincinnati, Mississippi State, Wichita State, Wake Forest and Rutgers, among others.
Obioha spent only one season with the Seahawks, where he averaged 9.2 points, 6.0 rebounds, 1.2 blocks and shot 63-percent from the field while starting 23 games this past year.
That included 7 points and 9 rebounds against Texas Tech in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament.
Prior to that Obioha spent two years at Niagara where he averaged 2.9 points and 3.1 rebounds in the first season in just over 9 minutes per game. Those totals saw a significant increase as a sophomore jumping to 10.3 points, 7.8 rebounds and 0.8 blocks per game before transferring to UNC Wilmington.
Hodge, who was officially introduced as the head coach of the program Thursday, closed out his season with his North Texas basketball team prior to taking the job. But during that time, he was busy preparing for the next step in Morgantown and with that it meant getting to work on constructing a roster.
In fact, during that time he was still overtop of the Mean Green basketball program he estimated that around 70-percent of his time was spent on recruiting the transfer portal.
“You were making recruiting phone calls, and you're talking about West Virginia basketball, and how incredible this is, and the opportunity, and there's a lot of excitement around it, and we'll hit the ground running here,” Hodge said.
Hodge made it clear that while the focus would be on attracting talented players to Morgantown, he wasn’t going to rush the process just to fill out a roster. That meant making quality decisions on those players that he does want to bring to Morgantown for his first roster with the Mountaineers.
And while the dead period will remain in effect through April 10, which means no in-person contact between coaches and players, there is still a concentrated effort on setting up visits afterwards and keeping an open line of communication with those key transfer targets.
That means that while there won’t be any visits, there will be plenty of work being done and the fruits of that labor has already paid off with one commitment from Obioha.
But with only four scholarship players on the roster and essentially an entire rebuild needed for the Mountaineers, there’s still a lot more work to be done.
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