YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — West Virginia’s first game as a top 25 team in more than a year didn’t go exactly as planned Saturday.
“They took the fight to us. We didn’t take the fight to them,” WVU head coach Bob Huggins said not once, but three times in his postgame press conference following the No. 25 Mountaineers’ 75-64 victory against Youngstown State in front of 3,614 fans inside the Covelli Centre.
A young but seemingly maturing Penguins’ roster outhustled the Mountaineers throughout the game and came away with a 39-38 rebounding advantage, despite being the smaller team.
“We didn’t come out with the energy that we needed,” said WVU guard Jermaine Haley, who scored 11 points coming off a one-game benching last week. “I give them a lot of the credit. They played hard and came right at us.”
That led to a 38-35 halftime lead for Youngstown State (7-6), which grew to 42-35 in the opening moments of the second half.
Much of that came by the design of Youngstown State head coach Jerrod Calhoun, who learned much of his craft as a former assistant coach under Huggins at WVU.
Calhoun was quick to note that Huggins’ teams at West Virginia have traditionally been some of the tougher teams in the country and that is the type of attitude he is trying to instill in his third season with the Penguins.
“We wanted to outplay them and we wanted to out-tough them,” Calhoun said. “We wanted to outwork them and be the first to the floor. At the end of 40 minutes, we did not want to have anything left in the tank.
“We out-rebounded them, which was a shocker to me. I told our guys, ‘Let’s leave it out there and try to outwork them.’ For a lot of the game, we did.”
The Mountaineers (10-1) made their eventual comeback through being the bigger and more athletic team.
“They were making tough shots, finishing at the rim and were out-rebounding us in the first half,” said WVU guard Miles McBride, who added 10 points and five rebounds. “We got locked down in the second half. We knew they couldn’t keep making those shots for much longer.”
Haley’s reverse lay-up broke a tie at 48 with 13:04 remaining and the Mountaineers never trailed again. McBride followed that up with a dunk off of a nice feed from Derek Culver, who finished with 15 points, seven rebounds and a career-high seven assists in his homecoming game.
Culver, who said he had nearly 80 members of his family and friends at the game, along with freshman forward Oscar Tshiebwe provided the difference.
Once WVU guards were able to work the ball inside, the Mountaineers had the advantage.
“Honestly, we should,” Huggins said. “They don’t have Derek. They don’t have Oscar. We should, when you can throw it close like that.”
It was also a bit of a homecoming for Tshiebwe, who played at Kennedy Catholic in Hermitage, Pa., which is less than a 30-minute drive from Youngstown.
Tshiebwe sparked WVU in the second half with two and-one 3-point plays along with a dunk after getting out and running the floor in transition.
He finished with 19 points and six rebounds.
McBride may have had the play of the game, when he knocked the ball loose from Darius Quisenberry near mid-court and then was able to make a pass before going out of bounds to a wide open Taz Sherman for a breakout dunk.
All of it looks good in a box score. Little of it felt good watching it unfold to Huggins. “You don’t start the way you should, it’s hard to turn it around in the middle of a game,” he said. “They took the fight to us.
“They beat us to loose balls. They got a lot of long rebounds when we were kind of standing around watching. They got rebounds at the free-throw line that we were just standing there watching. They played harder than we did.”
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