MORGANTOWN, W. Va. — Derek Culver jokes that he has a new relationship with his alarm clock heading into his sophomore season.
“If I have to be somewhere, it’s set for an hour and a half early now,” the West Virginia forward said before Monday’s team practice leading up to the Mountaineers’ trip to Spain on Aug. 3 to play in three exhibition games.
That would have been a good habit a year ago, when Culver missed 10 games and the first half of another for misdemeanors that were the result of, well …
“Last year was me being a knucklehead and not doing the things I should have been doing,” Culver said in finishing the thought.
Nothing major. Culver’s name wasn’t showing up in the daily police report, which is something West Virginia coach Bob Huggins really stresses when discussing his budding 6-foot-10 star.
“Last year was me being a knucklehead and not doing the things I should have been doing.”
West Virginia forward Derek Culver
Late for a class or practice here and there, stuff Huggins joked would have forced a suspension from the entire media corps covering WVU during their college days.
“Derek just has a timeliness issue,” Huggins said. “He hasn’t had that this summer at all, well, one time he did. You have to make sure he understands that you can’t do that.
“It’s not bad stuff. When you think about guys doing bad things, it’s not bad things he’s doing. It’s just every once in a while he doesn’t show up on time.”
The issues forced Huggins to bench Culver for the first game of the season and then later suspend him for the next nine to ensure he was concentrating on his academics.
In the team’s second-round CBI loss against Coastal Carolina to end the season, Culver showed up late for the game and was benched for the first half.
“Coming back for my sophomore season, I just really need to do the right things,” Culver said. “If I can just get to that first game, I’ll take my sigh of relief, like, “I made progress. I’m not doing the same things I did last year.’”
Culver admits he worried about how his suspension looked in the eyes of others and maybe he was being misunderstood as someone who didn’t take his opportunity at WVU seriously enough.
“That’s the thing, it wasn’t anything completely over the border,” said Culver, who averaged 11.5 points and 9.9 rebounds per game last season. “Even when I was late, it wasn’t like I was 40 minutes late or something like that. It was more like two or three minutes all the time. That’s what I had to understand, that even that wasn’t acceptable.”
A season later, Culver is already anticipating a lot of changes in the Mountaineers’ style of play, with much of it centering around freshman teammate Oscar Tshiebwe, the 6-foot-9 McDonald’s All-American who will keep a lot of double- and triple-teams off of Culver.
“Yeah, those triple-teams really caught me off guard, because you never knew when they were coming,” he said. “Having Oscar out there, teams aren’t going to leave him open, so they really can’t double on either of us. That’s really going to help us open things up a lot.”
The pair work together and also against each other in practice, setting up a sort of preview for what opposing teams will have to prepare for down the road.
“If Derek continues with the attitude that he’s displayed to this point and if he continues to work like he has, he’s a guy I think we can build around,” Huggins said. “I think it’s great for Oscar to play against Derek everyday. Oscar is finding out that he’s not the strongest dude out there, which is different for him. At the same time, we’ve got two guys who can go get it.”
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