By Keenan Cummings
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — West Virginia is knee-deep in trying to close out the 2021 recruiting class, but that hasn’t stopped the Mountaineers from doing plenty of work on the next year, as well.
The Mountaineers current 16-man class is on pace to finish as the best in the Rivals.com internet era in terms of average star rating — with a mark of 3.25. But there’s also been a lot of focus on building the next cycle, which means that the coaches have placed an emphasis on mining the 2022 group.
The coaches have been highly aggressive when it comes to building the 2022 board, targeting prospects and offering them throughout key areas. If you’ve paid attention, you’ve likely noticed the flurry of scholarship offers coming out of the Puskar Center to current junior prospects in recent weeks.
The Mountaineers have been equally proactive when it comes to the usage of virtual visits and contact with those recruits. Since the contact period opened in September, the coaching staff has been all over prospects with messages, video calls, FaceTimes and everything in between.
Because teams are not permitted to host recruits on visits, the coaches have utilized what they have available by tweaking and refining what they have done with their virtual platforms. That is essentially a way to bring a recruit to Morgantown without them ever stepping foot on campus. It doesn’t beat the real thing, but given the circumstances, it is as much as they could hope for in the current climate.
Those visits include detailed looks at campus and the facilities, while meeting with the coaching staff, as well as all other pertinent areas (academics, strength and more). It’s giving prospects the opportunity to get to know what the West Virginia program is all about, as well as the coaches. It’s a useful tool and one you can expect to be part of the picture in some way even when things to “return to normal.”
So with all of this work being done, it begs the question, where’s the beef?
Not literally, but where are the commitments in the 2022 class and why is West Virginia sitting with a goose egg? Well, some of that is simply prospects waiting things out in order to see how the process develops and if they will be afforded the chance to visit schools down the road.
Another portion is the Mountaineers aren’t overly aggressive in forcing commitments, and instead, let the prospects navigate the process and decide when they are ready to pull the trigger. It’s a formula that works as we’ve seen over the past two classes.
Still, with so much work being done and how proactive the coaches have been, it should only be a matter of time until the program is able to reel in some talented 2022 prospects, too.
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