MORGANTOWN — Joseph Yesufu has been there and back again.
He’s been part of your hateful thoughts before and then not in your thoughts at all.
It’s all been part of the WVU guard’s journey through college basketball, a travel that’s taken him to both extremes of the spectrum and just about everywhere in between.
“I’ve moved around,” Yesufu said. “Not a lot of people get the opportunity to be in different places, but I look at that as being a great opportunity to connect with different people.”
In short, Yesufu’s career will end sort of where it began, with Darian DeVries as his head coach. It was DeVries who first recruited the Bolingbrook, Ill. native to Drake back in 2019.
“The reason I chose coach DeVries again is he’s a great coach,” Yesufu said. “To be honest, he didn’t have to accept me back. That just shows the kind of person he is, the kind of coach he is. To accept me back, I’ll never forget that.”
He was a young up-and-comer back in those early days, including consecutive 30-point games near the end of his sophomore season.
Afterward, Yesufu tried his hand playing for one of the blue bloods.
He transferred to Kansas, the villain and hated rival of all other teams in the Big 12.
“I loved Kansas,” he said. “It’s a great community. I had great teammates, great coaching staff.”
That was evident when the Jayhawks held off North Carolina for the 2022 national championship, which sets up Yesufu as a great answer to a trivia question.
As in which WVU player has won a national title?
In another sense, he’s also the lone player on the WVU roster that local fans likely booed at one time.
“In a way, it’s kind of fun,” Yesufu says with a smile. “Going into a game, you know the crowd is not going to be on your side at all. You’re going to get the best from your opponent, which is what we loved. There was always a target on our backs.”
Playing time was tough to find in his two seasons with the Jayhawks. Yesufu played in 69 games at Kansas, but started only three and never averaged more than 12.7 minutes played per game.
That led him into the transfer portal a second time. Yesufu ended up at Washington State last season, but was limited to just six games.
A nagging hip injury became too much to bear and Yesufu elected to have season-ending surgery.
“I’m not going to lie, it was tough,” said Yesufu, who is medically cleared and practicing again at WVU. “I’ve never been away from basketball for that long.
“When I look back on it, I needed it. I had to take a step back and realize what’s really important, and that’s Jesus Christ. That’s how I look at it.”
Healthy once again, Yesufu is simply trying to find his role once again amongst faces that weren’t always familiar to him in a college town he knew very little about.
In Yesufu’s college journey, he’s been there before.
“It’s the same process,” he said. “When you first get here, you’ve got to feel people out. You see what makes them mad or what makes them happy.
“That’s how you bond. That’s how you build relationships with everybody. That’s how you create a team.”
