West Virginia prepares for challenges of quick turnaround road trip
West Virginia is preparing for the team’s second consecutive short turnaround road trip with a lot still hanging in the balance for this basketball team.
The Mountaineers will be playing a 4 p.m. conference game at Kansas Saturday before turning around for a 9 p.m. tipoff at Iowa State Monday.
It’s the third consecutive week that West Virginia has dealt with the Saturday-Monday turnaround on the schedule and second consecutive time on the road.
There are obvious challenges with how quickly things must be turned around comes with preparation and simply getting a team physically ready for it.
This past week, the Mountaineers focused on staying off their feet in order to ready themselves for the challenge.
“We haven’t gone near as hard or near as long in practice this week. Not sure what else you can do,” head coach Bob Huggins said.
While the consecutive home games are different on a quick turnaround, the road games are a challenge in the sense with the additional travel required. The team will fly to one location and play a game then hit the road again with travel in order to get to the next spot in short order.
That is the major difference when compared to playing in the NCAA Tournament.
“You get done with the first game then you go back to the hotel, you rest, you watch film, you get a bite to eat, you get some sleep, you wake up, you go to shoot around at the place then you play,” Huggins said. “You don’t jump on a plane and fly for a couple hours or more.”
There is little time for prep given the travel and because of that the Mountaineers are focused entirely on how to prepare for Kansas before turning the page to the Cyclones. That means once the Jayhawks game is done, the travel will commence and West Virginia will then look at some film prior to the game.
“Our guys haven’t thought about Iowa State,” Huggins said.
It’s just another difficult chapter in a travel saga that Huggins has made crystal clear is the most challenging in all of the Big 12 given the distances between each stop.
The Mountaineers are still firmly on the bubble for the time being at 16-12 and 5-10 in the league but finding a way to win one of these two games it would go a long way toward securing a spot in the tournament. A critical road trip is on deck and West Virginia must be prepared either way.
“We’re banged up. Trying to get guys healed up,” he said.
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