Photograph courtesy of BlueGoldNews.com
Josh Eilert, who served as WVU’s interim basketball coach final season, has accepted an assistant publish with Large 12 Convention newcomer Utah.
MORGANTOWN — It’s simple to have goals, onerous to meet them.
That was the lesson to be taken out of Wednesday’s happenings throughout the West Virginia College athletic division.
In Chapel Hill, N.C., baseball coach Randy Mazey was being reminded that 12 years in the past to the day he took on the job of main the Mountaineer baseball program out of the wilderness and right into a outstanding place amongst baseball powers.
The state of affairs was daunting, altering from the Large East to the Large 12, enjoying in an antiquated stadium, the college hardly a recruiting vacation spot for prime expertise. Mazey needed to rebuild it from the underside up however had a dream.
“My imaginative and prescient for this program, in future years within the month of June, is to be holding practices, not press conferences,” he stated then as he was introduced as the brand new WVU baseball coach.
Now Mazey discovered himself standing within the Mountaineers’ dugout as they went by way of a exercise for this system’s first ever Tremendous Regional. He wore not a coat and tie as he had 12 years earlier and he wasn’t preaching from a podium however as an alternative in his pure habitat … a baseball diamond.
“That was the imaginative and prescient 12 years in the past and it’s fairly cool you guys are reminding me of that proper now as a result of it’s one thing we’ve by no means finished earlier than … Fairly cool for this system,” he stated.
After a dozen years, he’d put himself inside two wins of the School Baseball World Sequence in Omaha as he coached his ultimate season, having introduced his retirement almost a full yr earlier.
Who is aware of what these subsequent couple of weeks will maintain, however ought to there be some Mazey Magic maybe he would possibly go away behind not solely a legacy however, maybe, a statue of his personal on the Kendrick Household Ballpark that he has changed into the spring place to be in Morgantown.
However, it isn’t that simple, as one other occasion on Wednesday reminded us all.
There shall be no statue for Josh Eilert, who on that very same day was named an assistant basketball coach at Utah.
Eilert was the person chosen and receptive to fall on his personal sword because the interim coach for Bob Huggins, who had a most sudden and messy finish to his Corridor of Fame teaching profession at his alma mater.
We is not going to bore you with the main points, for in case you are studying this you nearly definitely know the particulars of his fall from grace. However suffice it to say that what had been a yr with rising anticipation of success got here fully unwound.
Huggins was gone, his recruits have been gone … And it got here on the worst doable time. Luring away a confirmed, skilled coach was realistically out of the query and financially suicide.
Athletic director Wren Baker needed to be creative and he turned to Eilert, who had however one season as a bench assistant, and provided him a dream that might turn into a nightmare.
He was to be paid $1 million as an interim with no guarantees for the long run. He knew the deck was stacked in opposition to him, however he didn’t know that each one the playing cards he could be dealt would come from the underside of that stacked deck.
Gamers transferred out. He needed to recruit a brand new class at a time when the pool wasn’t very deep. He needed to put in a brand new system with new gamers.
After which the NCAA stepped up and suspended one participant for 9 video games, did not grant RaeQuan Battle a switch waiver whereas accidents took aside what was left of his group.
Not like Mazey, Eilert didn’t have the privilege of long-term planning. His goals have been quick time period, merely to do one of the best he might do, to show himself worthy of being part of the seek for a everlasting coach.
He had regarded for recommendation however actually few had ever been in such a place, though one he knew had.
His identify was Joe Mazzulla, a former Mountaineer participant who had turn into interim coach for the Boston Celtics and who at present is teaching within the NBA Finals for the second yr in a row.
“He informed me to only have a look at it as the best alternative in your life,” Eilert stated on the time. “In loads of methods you might be enjoying with home cash.”
However all the pieces conspired in opposition to him having any success and, ultimately, whereas Mazey was in place to meet his dream and was in quest of an NCAA Championship, Eilert was in quest of a job.
Morally, ethically he had confirmed himself, from a basketball perspective his group misplaced extra video games in a season than every other group had misplaced. He actually had no probability within the Large 12, the proverbial man going right into a gunfight with a knife … and a butter knife at that.
He fought many a battle for his gamers, particularly Battle in his confrontation with the NCAA that finally gave him and all others in his state of affairs an opportunity to play.
However ultimately he discovered himself merely one other rock caught in the course of a landslide with a bumpy trip to the underside.
There was, nevertheless, a reward for him awaiting in Utah, a group coming into the Large 12 for the primary time. He was employed as an assistant, bringing with him no matter data he took from working with Huggins, a greater individual for surviving the worst expertise of his life, and a data of the league and its gamers that can serve him and Utah properly.
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