MORGANTOWN — The WVU men’s basketball team will find out Thursday just how far of a climb it has within the Big 12, when the conference releases its preseason poll.
The Mountaineers tied for last place a season ago with a 4-14 league mark, brought in a new head coach in Darian DeVries, as well as 12 new scholarship players, so it might be quite a climb to reach the upper echelon of expectations.
In a greater sense, the WVU players have already faced such a challenge.
Morgantown locals simply know it as Law School Hill, a gruesome sea of green grass that simply continues to climb just outside of Milan Puskar Stadium.
On a warm summer day, it’s a perfect spot to lay out a blanket and take a break from life for a moment. For WVU athletes, the hill is anything but a break.
It is nearly a 200-yard climb from bottom to the top on an incline that is roughly 70 degrees.
“I saw it with the football team on a video when they ran it,” WVU forward Toby Okani said. “We got the word that we were going to be running it, and I was like, OK.”
To a mere mortal, just the thought of running up the hill one time at full speed is exhausting. To a college athlete at his physical peak?
“The first thing is it’s huge,” WVU forward Tucker DeVries said. “I will be honest, after the first one I was like, ‘This is it?’”
No, it wasn’t.
“After three or four, you’re asking for a big break,” DeVries continued. “You realize you’re not even halfway done. It’s pretty awful.”
“That hill is very much; it gets you fast,” added Okani. “By the time you come down from the first three (runs), you’re going to feel that the rest of the day.”
There was a method to the madness, so to speak. Playing in a deep and talented Big 12 will be a major step up in competition for the majority of WVU’s roster.
A year ago at Drake, DeVries played in 34 games, only one came against a Top 25 opponent.
Now at WVU — with Kansas, Houston, Baylor, Iowa State, Arizona and Cincinnati all expected to be in the preseason Top 25 — the Mountaineers could go weeks where they only play nationally ranked teams.
Adversity will hit this WVU bunch at some point. How they handle it will go a long way in determining what kind of season the Mountaineers actually have.
“It helps when everybody is putting in the same amount of work and everyone is trying to go full tilt to get to where we want to be,” DeVries said. “When you’re going through things like the hill or when you’re going through tough practices, when you’re doing it all together, it certainly helps build that camaraderie and chemistry.
“Ultimately you want that to translate onto the court. The more you’re doing things together, the better it’s going to be. I think the culture has been set to a pretty good standard.”
This particular chemistry-building project came together on two different Wednesday mornings last month, as summer was coming to a close.
“We definitely improved from Week 1 to Week 2,” DeVries said. “I know the first week, we did seven or eight. The next week, we went way past that.”
And that was enough of the big green monster for these players.
“Now that we’re in season, I don’t think they plan on taking us back over to the hill,” DeVries said. “I hope it’s over.”
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