MORGANTOWN — We welcome you to the start of the 2021-22 basketball season and West Virginia kicks off its season at 7 p.m. tonight against an interesting Oakland (Mich.) team that is no stranger to playing Power 5 Conference teams in its non-conference schedule.
We’ll discuss that more in a minute. We begin today with the story of WVU’s Pauly Paulicap, a 6-foot-8 power forward who is in his final season of college eligibility after transferring from DePaul in April.
The 24-year old has many amazing stories to tell, but interestingly enough, that does not include his unique name.
“I don’t have a story for that,” he said in his first meeting with the West Virginia media on Monday. “That’s just what my mom named me.”
Obviously he realizes that Pauly Paulicap just sounds odd, even if it rolls off the tongue quite well, and the forward tries to have some fun with his unique name.
“I kid around and tell people my middle name is Paul,” he said with a smile.
In all seriousness, Paulicap credits sports with saving his life. He is from Elmont, N.Y., which is in Long Island, and it’s an area known for its sports, being the home of Belmont Race Course, as well as former New York Jets quarterback Vinny Testaverde.
Except Paulicap, even though he was always bigger than kids his age, never was one much for sports until late in his high school years.
“I was tall, high-energy, but I never did anything with it,” he said. “I was just getting in trouble and I’ll just leave it at that. I was always doing other things. I was a bad kid. I was all over the place, bouncing off the walls. I was a person of interest, a kid who did his own thing.”
That was until his junior year in high school, when he finally realized that living his life that particular way probably wasn’t in his best interest. In his own words, Paulicap said he needed to grow up.
“The university of life really hit and I realized I can’t be out here playing around anymore,” Paulicap said. “This is not a game; this is not a joke. Then it got really real, without saying too much, and I needed to do something.
“It was be something or be nothing. I didn’t want to be a statistic. I didn’t want to be what everybody expected me to be. Everybody expected me to be a failure. I didn’t want to give them that satisfaction.”
So, Paulicap got into sports. He threw the discus for the track team — “I was actually really good at that,” he said — as well as playing basketball for the first time. Early in his hoops career, Paulicap said, he did not look the part of a future Division I recruit.
“If you saw me play basketball when I started, you’d think this kid is never going anywhere playing basketball,” Paulicap said.
Then, as a senior, Paulicap began playing volleyball. He credits that sport for helping him focus his hand-eye coordination, as well as helping his leaping ability and athleticism.
“Playing volleyball was probably the best thing I did for my basketball,” he said. “It worked on my hand-eye coordination. It worked on my footwork. It worked on my timing and I was able to apply that to the game of basketball.”
His college basketball career began in junior college at Harcum (Pa.) before getting recruited to play at Manhattan. In junior college, he was sixth in the nation in blocked shots.
“That was all from playing volleyball,” he said. “I was able to focus myself. When someone was coming at the rim, I could focus on the ball just like I did a volleyball.”
He played three seasons at Manhattan and called it a great experience, but he knew he had only one chance at a college career, and he wanted to see if he could play at a higher level. Paulicap entered the transfer portal for the first time in 2020, and when DePaul was the biggest school that showed interest, he signed with the Blue Demons.
He averaged 7.2 points and 6.1 rebounds per game at DePaul last season. When the NCAA granted players an extra season of eligibility because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Paulicap again simply wanted to see if he could reach a higher level with his final season.
“I’m not going to sit here and say if you’re not happy at your school you should transfer,” Paulicap said. “Going in the portal is a scary thing to do. What I did was take a chance on myself. I wanted to test my abilities. I wanted to test how much I could take. I didn’t have very much support. It was my decision and I had to handle it myself.”
And now he finds himself in Morgantown playing for WVU and in the Big 12. His long journey from being a bad kid to proving so many doubters wrong is seemingly complete.
“It’s surreal. I think about it every day, honestly,” Paulicap said. “One of the graduate assistants here told me at our first practice, ‘This is going to be your last first practice of college basketball.’ When he said that, it woke me up a little bit. It made me realize I had to give it my all or I’m going to look back regretting that I didn’t give it everything I had.”
As we begin the new season, here’s what you need to know:
TV: ESPN+ (Online subscription needed) for the 7 p.m. tip-off. BETTING LINE: West Virginia is a 17.5-point favorite.
WHAT DOES BOB HUGGINS HAVE TO SAY?
WVU’s head coach went into some detail about his long-time relationship with Oakland coach Greg Kampe, who has been with the Golden Grizzlies for 37 seasons. Kampe is the third-longest tenured coach at one school, behind only Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim and Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski.
Huggins also opened up about the challenges college coaches have in dealing with players’ relationships with agents, telling a story about his Cincinnati days with former standout Kenyon Martin. Under the NCAA’s new Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) rules, college athletes are now permitted to sign with an agent while still in school, but Huggins’ concern is having the wrong guys involved who are only interested in making money off the athlete.
“It’s hard, because you have so many people on the outside and then you’ve got a bunch of wanna-be agents trying to sell the fact of what they can do,” Huggins said. “They know this person and they know that person and they’ll be able to get them into this deal, which never comes to fruition.
“You fight so many things on the outside. It’s hard to fight, because a lot of the times, you don’t even know who they are. We’ve had guys run around on our campus that I didn’t know. The ones I know, I can kind of chase off. There’s agents everywhere. We’d be stupid not to think there’s not a bunch of agents here preying on our guys from Pittsburgh or Cleveland or Youngstown (Ohio) or Columbus or wherever. They do, they prey on those kids. That, I think, is one of the hardest things we have to deal with in today’s world.”
TELL US ABOUT OAKLAND
A small public school located in the Detroit suburbs, the Golden Grizzlies have a daunting non-conference schedule this season, which is generally the case under Kampe.
Besides WVU, Oakland also has games scheduled this season against Oklahoma State, Alabama, Michigan State, Toledo, and Bowling Green, before beginning Horizon League play.
Oakland returns three starters and its first guy off the bench from a 12-18 team last season. It would have been five returning starters, but guard Rashard Williams transferred to St. Louis and forward Daniel Oladapo transferred to Pitt.
The key for the Golden Grizzlies is junior guard Jalen Moore who led the nation in assists last season at 8.4 per game. He also averaged 17.9 points per game and shot 35% from 3-point range.
PREDICTION TIME
This WVU team will be tough to figure out, because it does not have a typical low-post scoring threat that Huggins likes and it may not be the best defensive team. The Mountaineers will be streaky on offense, but have the potential to score a bunch of points. WVU beat Akron by 15 in an exhibition game with Taz Sherman sitting on the bench for most of the second half. It’s doubtful that happens today, so we’ll go with a WVU win and cover, 89-68.
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