West Virginia Mountaineers basketball team ready for Spain
West Virginia will only play three games on its upcoming trip to Spain, but there’s a lot more that the Mountaineers can take away from the experience.
The program will travel to Spain Aug. 3-13 and use the opportunity to get some competition against high-level teams, extra practice time and of course chances to gel as a team with so many new faces. Only seven players return from the roster from a season ago meaning that it will provide a chance for both the new and old additions from the roster to get to know one another on and off the court.
“I think it’s a great opportunity for them to bond. We’ve got a lot of new guys and the more time they spend together the better that is for us,” head coach Bob Huggins said.
As part of that concept, sophomores Jordan McCabe and Emmitt Matthews have taken the reigns when it comes to leadership on the club with both including each of their teammates in all activities away from the court.
That is an element that many of the quality clubs that Huggins has coached in the past has possessed and is something that those two fully understand.
Huggins has already seen that element unfolding in Morgantown as the upperclassmen have embraced freshman center Oscar Tshiebwe, the most recent addition, and acclimated him into the program.
“You can’t tell the difference between the old guys and the new guys, but of course the old guys aren’t that old,” the veteran head coach said. “They get along great, they hang together. It’s a lot like the really good teams we’ve had in the past.”
The Mountaineers aren’t expected to practice every day that they will be in Spain but the goal is to do so on most days with practice in the morning before turning the players loose. The experience won’t be solely about basketball as there are planned sight-seeing stops at various landmarks.
Huggins expects the competition level to be from the top Spanish level teams minus the Americans that play for those clubs. He has been to Spain on one other occasion with a college all-star team and was able to see the competition up close as his team won a few games and lost some others.
There also will be an adjustment with the rules as well such as with goal tending.
Not all of the players are expected to make the trip overseas as Huggins projects that it’s likely that guard Tajzmel Sherman and forward Ethan Richardson will not make the trip as they finish things up.
“That’s two and we may have one more, we’ll see how it goes,” he said.
Still, Huggins is eager for the experience in order to see how his team handles the first real competitive situation that they will find themselves in next month. The players have only been allowed to work one hour but have been doing a lot of work outside on their own.
“You don’t have to coach enthusiasm with these guys. A year ago we were trying to coach effort and basketball and it’s hard to do both,” he said. “These guys, their effort has been fantastic, their attitude has been great and they’ve spent a lot of time in this building.”
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