MORGANTOWN — It was not so much a sense of relief for Weston Mazey, but rather a feeling of what he expected all along when his father, Randy Mazey, announced he was retiring from coaching the WVU baseball team following the 2024 season.
See, it won’t be long — next summer, to be exact — before the Morgantown High shortstop will be making his way onto the Mountaineers’ roster.
“In my mind, I never wanted him to feel pressure to play me. I never wanted him to go through that,” Mazey said. “I had always thought all along that he would retire before I started college. When he made the announcement, it was pretty much what I had expected.”
In turn, it will be dad in the stands rather than the WVU dugout during Mazey’s college career.
“He may not be on the field, but he’ll always be my coach,” Mazey said.
Athletics have always played some role in the Mazey family, but it wasn’t always baseball.
Weston said he’s been playing hockey since he was five, and when the family first moved to Morgantown from Texas back in 2012, the first thought was the family would be closer to that sport.
“Hockey is a sport my dad really loves, but he never played,” Mazey said. “I remember when we first moved, dad was talking about getting closer to hockey and going to Penguins games and things like that.
“We went to Toronto one time to go watch (Alek) Manoah pitch and we went and watched the Maple Leafs play, so yeah, he really loves hockey.”
Father’s Day for the Mazeys, not surprisingly, will be spent on a baseball field, as Weston will be participating in a high school showcase in Cincinnati.
For the last 12 years, Randy Mazey continued to take the Mountaineers to new heights.
At one time just before WVU hired Mazey, it had considered eliminating the program.
It was believed to be too costly to try and fund the program to the point of competing in a baseball-rich Big 12 Conference.
“When we first got here, we were playing games in Charleston, because (Hawley Field) just wasn’t good enough,” Weston Mazey said. “I’ll never forget that, and then to see the new stadium built and how everything just sort of took off from there, that was pretty cool.”
Taking off from there meant Randy Mazey getting WVU to the NCAA tournament in 2017, and then the Mountaineers hosted an NCAA regional two years later.
There was a Big 12 championship in 2023, before WVU won the Tucson (Ariz.) Regional this year, advancing the Mountaineers to its first-ever super regional.
History will one day judge Randy Mazey as a trailblazer at WVU, taking the program from the brink of being wiped out altogether to having the Mountaineers going toe-to-toe with the best in the nation.
Not once, though, did Mazey ever take the credit.
“That’s just who my dad is,” Weston Mazey said. “He never does take credit for the good stuff. He takes the blame for the bad things, but I don’t think he’s ever wanted credit for anything good that happened.”
Along the way, Weston Mazey was there, too, in the dugout with the players and coaches as they made history.
In a sense, Weston Mazey has always been there. Some of his earliest memories of baseball are being out on the field while the WVU players stretched before practice.
Dad would throw him some pitches and hit him some ground balls.
Now it was Randy Mazey’s last year and WVU was on a historic run.
From Weston Mazey’s point of view, he got the opportunity to share the special moments with his dad, while also seeing who his father really was in the heat of those moments.
“He’s always been more worried about making men than winning games,” Weston said. “I think that’s what made him a good coach.
“He cared about who his players are and what they would become. When you do that, players are going to give everything they have for you. They’re going to play with a chip on their shoulder, because he’s such a fun guy to play for.”
