MORGANTOWN — For those who have never attended an AAU basketball game, it’s really not much different than your average pickup game at your local rec center or YMCA.
Except one end of the court is roped off for college coaches there to scout the players. It is a world of their own of sorts, one designed to cut them off from the rest of the gymnasium, yet everyone in the arena knows who they are and where they are.
Jordan McCabe spent years playing on the other side of those ropes. It wasn’t until recently he got his first opportunity to duck under that rope and join the coaching fraternity.
The opportunity came this summer when McCabe, who had just wrapped up his playing career at UNLV on March 9, was hired by WVU interim head coach Josh Eilert.
“Being the youngest assistant coach in the Power Five, you’re going to get some weird looks,” said McCabe, who began his college career at WVU, before transferring to UNLV in 2021. “I went to my first AAU event and stood behind the ropes as a coach. Other coaches were telling me, ‘I just recruited you like six years ago.’ ”
McCabe has been 25 years old for all of two months now. He’s engaged and is in the midst of planning a wedding sometime in the future.
Like the rest of the WVU coaching staff, he’s working on a one-season contract.
“Weddings are expensive, I’m finding out very quickly,” McCabe said. “I’ve told her we may have to wait a little while to be able to do all the things she wants to do. May 2025 is kind of our target date. Hopefully we’ll be a little more settled at that time.”
It is almost unheard of for someone of McCabe’s age to be a full-time paid assistant at a Power Five Conference school.
In comparison, when Eilert was 25, he was still working his way up the ranks as the video coordinator at WVU under Bob Huggins.
“We’ve had lots of conversations about that,” Eilert said. “I remember being right in the business in the early years, and everybody would kind of keep you down.
“It was like, ‘Well, you don’t have the experience to be an assistant.’ Well, how am I going to get experience? Someone had to believe in me. Until someone gives you that opportunity and gives you that belief, you’re not going to get that opportunity.”
When it came to McCabe, Eilert said he believed in McCabe’s ability to become a coach, regardless of his age.
“What I did with Jordan, I believed in Jordan,” Eilert continued. “He’s a high-character guy. He’s knowledgeable. He’s energetic. He’s got all the qualities in being a good assistant coach, not just on the floor, but each and every day. I think he’ll be a head coach in the coming years. I have a high belief in him, so I was more than happy to give him the opportunity.”
At WVU, McCabe’s focus is on the point guards, where Kobe Johnson is showing signs of positive development, while teammate Kerr Kriisa has six more games left in his nine-game suspension.
“I was a 5-foot-10 unathletic guy, who played in the Big 12,” McCabe said of how he approaches coaching. “What could I do with someone who is 6-7 with a 40-inch vertical? I try to instill some of the work ethic and the nuance that I took upon myself in my own player development. That’s what I try to do.”
He briefly thought of continuing to play overseas professionally. There was also a chance to break in at a Big Ten school in player development, but none of those opportunities, McCabe said, hit him as hard as getting a chance to become a full-time coach.
“My fiancé asks me every day how I feel and if I made the right decision,” McCabe said. “I tell her, and anybody else who asks, the best decision I’ve ever made in my life was getting into coaching. I’m absolutely in love with it. I’m obsessed with it. I don’t see myself doing anything else for the rest of my life.”
