MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Sometimes, all it takes is a good calling-out to motivate a player on the verge of a breakout year. The way it looks for Morgantown center Carson Poffenberger, Dave Tallman’s lighthearted jab after the Mohigans’ win over Notre Dame has done just that.
“That was a wake-up call,” Poffenberger said. “I think I’ve [said it before], but I felt like I wasn’t doing enough for my team. I felt like I was the weak link in the chain, and I felt like I needed to do more. I thought I was letting my guys down if I wasn’t doing my best.”
Since then, a game that saw Poffenberger score seven points, the 6-foot-7 junior has averaged double digits, starting with a 17-point performance over Spring Valley in the final game of the Big Shots Country Roads Tip-Off. That was capped on Saturday with a season-high 19 points against Woodrow Wilson in the final game of the G-Force Lock & Safe tournament, a show that garnered him game MVP honors as the Mohigans (5-0) remained undefeated.
“It definitely has gone well so far,” Poffenberger said. “Every night I go out and do what I can for my team, trying to get done what I need [to] so we can win.”
And this is all coming after there was doubt about MHS’s post-play after Nick Malone graduated.
Although Poffenberger has been the spark the Mohigans need in a lot of situations, Tallman isn’t exactly happy with where his offense is yet. One thing he is happy with, for the time being, is the defense — another piece of the team that Poffenberger leads.
“We’re starting to come together as a whole-team defense,” Poffenberger said. “We work on that a lot. And I think a lot of the success we’ve had to stay undefeated is coming from that.”
No doubt. MHS held the Eagles — consistently one of the best basketball teams in the state — to 58 points in total and 25 at the half on Saturday. In total, Morgantown’s defense has allowed 247 points with the most — 60 — coming from Spring Valley. And they haven’t played gimme games, either.
Poffenberger noted that something leading to MHS’s success is not only Tallman’s coaching ability but the inside coaching as well, no matter who it comes from.
“I think it’s understood across our team that wherever a correction comes from, we take that constructive criticism well,” he said. “That’s another big staple if you can’t be corrected and we don’t have coaching within our team [from] other players then we won’t have a good team.”
Whether things hold together is for time to tell, but one certainty going forward into a string of games in January against Preston, Martinsburg, Wheeling Park and two — yes, two games — against No. 1 University, is that Poffenberger will be leading the Mohigans.
