MORGANTOWN — It’s no secret that the Mountain State likes its basketball. High school gymnasiums across the state will be packed full of parents and fans cheering on their favorite teams in the coming months.
One of those fans is Marshall University senior Michael Waugh. A George Washington graduate, Waugh fell in love with the game as a team manager for GW when the Patriots won the Class AAA state title in 2018.
Wanting to keep up with the sport even while in college, Waugh would routinely go online looking for scores to see who won and who lost on any given night. The only problem was that the information oftentimes proved hard to come by.
“Back in late December last year, I was looking for basketball scores online and I couldn’t find anything,” Waugh said. “I was looking for scores that just weren’t there.”
Instead of giving up, Waugh decided to try and do something about it to help grow the sport he loves so much. Soon after, Waugh created the WV Prep Basketball Twitter account (@wvprepbb) with the intention of just posting as many scores as he could.
“I created the page with the purpose of finding scores,” Waugh said. “That’s really where it started.”
Waugh quickly found out that there are plenty of people across the state just like him.
“In the first two months, we had over 1,000 (followers),” he said. “This year, we’ve had over 10,000,000 impressions.”
Waugh figures that people are interested in state-wide scores because there are, comparatively, so few schools in West Virginia. Unlike a state like Ohio or Pennsylvania which has hundreds of high schools, fans in West Virginia usually know a good bit about teams across the state.
“If you’re Wheeling Park and you’re in the same class as Martinsburg, you might want to know what the score is,” Waugh said. “The same with smaller schools. If you’re James Monroe, you might be interested in the score that East Hardy had.”
The Twitter account was so successful during the season that Waugh saw the potential to keep it going over the offseason. He started keeping up with in-state student-athletes as they played AAU ball in the summer and eventually put on a prospect showcase for nearly 75 players in September.
“Eventually it expanded to what we were doing after the season. We did some AAU stuff and then we had the good idea to have a showcase,” Waugh explained. “It went great, we had over 30 coaches come out.”
The success of the showcase led to the idea of hosting two preseason media days for coaches and media members to get together and preview the upcoming season. The first of those media days was held Sunday at Anderson Court in Morgantown where 22 boys and girls coaches from the Northern half of the state came together to talk about their teams. That included coaches from as far away as Williamstown and several from the eastern panhandle.
“In a lot of other states, they have that or there are some organizations for that,” Waugh explained. “That’s what we’re trying to do here…There are a lot of areas in that state that really have no coverage at all and it’s hard to find info for certain schools.”
A media day for the southern half is scheduled for Dec. 4 at the Walker Convocation Center on the campus of West Virginia State University.
The most important thing for Waugh has been the support of sponsors that have allowed him do everything — the Twitter account, showcase and media day — free of charge.
“We didn’t want it to be a service that people had to pay for to see scores so it’s great having sponsors all over the state that have supported this,” he said. “We’re having this event for free because of sponsors.”
Sunday’s event was sponsored by BSN Sports, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Par Mar Stores and others and was catered by Colasante’s Ristorante & Pub.
Waugh intends to graduate from Marshall with a marketing degree in May and is planning even bigger and better things for WV Prep Basketball in the future.
“Next year we plan to do more just because of the success we had,” he said. “At least do two (showcases) a year and we even plan on doing a coaching clinic as well.”
TWEET — @CodyNespor
