MORGANTOWN — The voice rings throughout the WVU Coliseum in a way Billy Hahn has heard hundreds of times over.
Bob Huggins is standing there in the middle of the floor, his eyes focused on another West Virginia practice, but his words are loud enough to be heard a county away.
“I can’t tell you how many times he would get on guys like Jevon Carter or Daxter Miles Jr.,” says Hahn, a Huggins assistant at WVU for 10 years. “He’s yelling at them, ‘You’re soft. You’re not good enough.’ It would be like that for most of a three-hour practice, but as soon as practice was over, he’s hugging on them and joking around with them. I remember thinking: How does he do that?”
It is Huggins’ unique style, one that is demanding and unforgiving one minute, fun-loving the next.
It’s a style meant to help develop boys into men; prospects into realized potential, and, no, it’s not for everyone.
But it’s a style that’s carried a young kid born in Morgantown into a close-knit family of nine into a Hall-of-Famer.
That’s who Huggins is today, as reports from The Athletic and ESPN late Thursday said the WVU head coach will be part of the Class of 2022 for the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
The official announcement comes at noon Saturday. The induction ceremony is scheduled for Sept. 10 in Springfield, Mass.
It’s here we take a different spin on Hahn’s question, as to ask how did Huggins become a hall-of-fame coach?
“The first thing I’ll say is this is an honor for him that’s long overdue,” Hahn begins. “He should have been inducted long before this. As to how he got here, Bob Huggins made a career out of making something special out of guys very few other coaches wanted.”
It’s a story Huggins himself has joked about before when telling the story of working with Hall-of-Fame coach Roy Williams one summer at Michael Jordan’s camp.
“Roy had this worried look on his face,” Huggins said. “I told him, ‘Don’t worry, I can’t get the kids you want and you don’t want the kids I get.’ Ever since then, we’ve been fine. Roy’s my guy.”
At first glance, Huggins’ resumé for the Hall doesn’t look that much different than Williams’ or even others who had been previously inducted from the same era like Mike Krzyzewski, Jim Calhoun or Jim Boeheim.
Huggins and Williams are the only two Division I coaches to record at least 300 wins at two schools, with Huggins earning 399 at Cincinnati and 326 with the Mountaineers.
Huggins’ 916 wins put him higher on the all-time Division I list over legendary names such as Dean Smith, Adolph Rupp and Bob Knight.
He’s got two Final Fours under his belt, twice was named the national coach of the year and his teams have won 13 regular-season conference championships and appeared in 34 postseason tournaments.
A deeper dive into those numbers, though, show the glaring disparity between Huggins and those he’ll now be enshrined with.
Krzyzewski has coached 37 All-Americans — not counting the 2021-22 season — while Huggins has coached 14. Calhoun had 18 players selected in the first round of the NBA Draft. Huggins has coached six.
We could keep going with more comparisons, but you get the picture.
“Bob has always been able to make kids better,” Hahn said. “He coaches them hard, shows them lots of love and then they go out and play their hearts out for him.
“He didn’t always have the best talent, but he got the guys who wanted to work hard and win just as much as he did.”
Huggins, himself, was as much a tough-nosed point guard at WVU in the 1970s as he is on the sidelines today.
He’s always credited that part of himself to his father, Charlie, a Hall-of-Famer in is own right in the state of Ohio, who was all-business while teaching the fundamentals of the game.
That disciplined approach carried Bob through the coaching ranks beginning at Walsh College in 1980 through other stops at Akron, Cincinnati and Kansas State, before taking over at WVU in 2007.
By then, Huggins was already closing in on 600 career victories and was considered a future Hall-of-Fame coach.
His 16 seasons at Cincinnati put him on that doorstep, where he won 76% of his games with the Bearcats, along with a trip to the 1992 Final Four.
“This man brought the best out of us all,” tweeted Nick Van Exel, one of his star players at Cincinnati during that Final Four run. “We didn’t always like it, but we were running through a wall for him.”
Huggins’ success at WVU was built in similar fashion, by finding the diamonds in the rough and getting the most of their abilities.
He led the Mountaineers to the Final Four in 2010, the first time the school had advanced that far in the NCAA tournament since 1959.
WVU has appeared in the national rankings at least once in 11 of his 15 seasons and from 2015-18, the Mountaineers were ranked in the AP Top 25 for 55 consecutive weeks, one shy of tying the school record.
“The one thing Huggs never got the credit for is just how smart he really is,” Hahn said. “He always had a game plan. With everything that’s changing now in college athletics with the transfer portal and that stuff, it will be interesting to see how he adjusts to it. I know he’ll be fine, because he always had this way of figuring it out.”
With his induction in Sept., Huggins will join Jerry West and Rod Thorn as Naismith Hall-of-Famers with ties to WVU. “Hot” Rod Hundley was awarded the 2003 Curt Gowdy Media Award from the Naismith Hall of Fame after several years as the play-by-play voice of the Utah Jazz.
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