West Virginia pushing hard with goals in place
Neal Brown understands where his West Virginia football program is at entering the spring.
The Mountaineers return the most production and depth that they have since the sixth-year head coach took over the program but have used that as a motivational tool.
It started in January during winter conditioning and will continue throughout the spring and off-season with the coaches trying to get the most out of their team coming off a 9-4 campaign with a bowl win.
“We’ve got to do hard stuff better and we’ve intentionally made this off-season extremely hard because the expectation levels have increased,” he said. “They’ve increased outside the building, but they’ve also increased inside the building, so we’ve got to coach these guys harder. We’ve got to put harder stuff in front of them so that’s how we’ve embraced it.”
Brown believes that the leadership on this team has been the best it’s been thus far and overall, it’s been a fun group to coach that has shown to be rather a coach at this early stage of the process. But the challenge is to continue to make things tough, so the group continues to show improvement.
While last season was a positive step, the goals should be bigger.
“How do you get over the hump and be able to finish games where you’re able to play in Dallas? That’s the push for us, we’ve got to continue to get better,” Brown said.
The program has wrapped up the first of what are several phases of the off-season with winter conditioning in the rearview mirror. Up next will be spring practice and then a break in May before the eight-week summer session leads into fall camp and the season.
Brown was complimentary of the various support areas this off-season and believes that his team has shown growth from a physical standpoint and is closer to where they ultimately want to be.
“You’ll notice some significant differences in bodies, some body compositions, some body weights and that’s a credit to that group,” he said.
This spring West Virginia won’t conduct any back-to-back practices and will stagger them from Monday-Wednesday-Friday sessions one week to Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday in others. The Mountaineers are starting spring practice a week later in response to noticing that there were several soft tissue injuries the past few years when beginning right after players returned from spring break.
The emphasis this spring will be on teaching the players how to meet, walk through and practice while focusing on fundamentals and working on installing the base schemes.
“We’re going to install our base offense, our base defense, our base special teams schemes and try to rep it not only versus a look for our defense that our offense presents but things that they’re going to see down the road during the season. Same on offense especially into Big 12 play,” Brown said.
Personnel evaluation will be a part of that, and the goal is to identify which players can help and who needs to be moved around to fill needs or fit into certain sub-packages. And of course, there is a priority on staying healthy and heading into the summer at full strength.
West Virginia understands that the expectations will be higher, but for now, the focus is simply on themselves and they won’t start driving any of that home until later in the summer. The reasoning for that is teenagers typically don’t take a long-term view so it’s important not to lose sight of the work.
But once spring practice does begin, Brown acknowledges that they will have a clock ticking down not only over the 15 practices but leading up to the Penn State game.
“So, they’ll understand there is some urgency there. We’re not easing into it,” he said.
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