Mountaineers coach Eilert facing challenging situation
BlueGoldNews.com
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Certainly, if Bob Huggins were coaching West Virginia’s basketball team right now, the situation it finds itself in would be most perplexing and challenging, playing with such a short roster.
For that matter, it would be no different if Jim Boeheim were coaching the Mountaineers; if Dean Smith were; if Bob Knight were; if Mike Krzyzewski were.
They all have coached a lot of games, but not with a roster of so few scholarship players, caught up in an eligibility squabble with the NCAA to get RaeQuan Battle onto the court; still waiting four games for starting point guard Kerr Kriisa to get through his nine-game suspension and with Akok Akok still undergoing tests after collapsing on the floor during the exhibition game against George Mason.
Josh Eilert has five games of head coaching experience, winning two and losing three under those circumstances, and is without a history of problem-solving in far simpler situations than he faces now.
It seems to be coming at him and his players from all angles, much as SMU did with its full roster of athletic players going in and out while his group tried to gut it out to no avail.
In the end they may be better for it, even if their record won’t be, and that’s troubling.
“We certainly want to learn by winning. You don’t want to learn by losing, but you have to figure how to learn regardless,” Eilert said on Friday as his team returned to the court to get ready for Sunday’s 5 p.m. Coliseum visit from Bellarmine.
The mental challenges of being so shorthanded are many, coming from not having the team you expected to have and having no way to remedy it. They just have to learn from playing the game and how to approach it.
“Discipline down the stretch, whether it be turning the ball over when trying to get it into the post on a post-entry pass or the discipline in terms of getting that rebound where you need one stop and a rebound with a chance to win the game with 10 seconds left,” Eilert said, thinking back to Virginia loss in the second game of the Fort Myers Tip-Off.
The Mountaineers lost that game, 56-54, when they gave up two offensive rebounds in the closing seconds.
Bellarmine enters Sunday’s game with a 2-4 record.