MORGANTOWN — There are a number of ways to introduce Josh Eilert as the latest WVU men’s basketball assistant coach, all of them seemingly just as interesting as the next.
We could begin with his introduction with WVU head coach Bob Huggins back in 2006, which literally includes a tale of dirty laundry.
Or how Eilert may have passed on millions of dollars putting his financial mind to good use in the banking world and the stock market to get back into basketball.
Like any good story, maybe it’s best to start at the beginning, which for Eilert and the game of basketball, takes him back to his high school days in Osborne, Kan.
“I guess you could say I was the typical high school athlete, which is to say I thought I was better than I actually was,” he begins.
A 6-foot-7 kid in the state of Kansas usually doesn’t go unnoticed, except that’s exactly what happened to Eilert.
He had college offers from some smaller Division II and Division III schools, but Eilert wasn’t interested in those.
His dream was to play at a major Division I school, so he enrolled at Cloud County (Kan.) Community College with the hope of junior college bringing him more exposure.
That was Eilert’s first instance of betting on himself. Fast forward 21 years, and that track record for wanting to stay in the game has led him to his first stop as a Division I assistant with the Mountaineers.
Eilert, who has spent the past 15 years with the WVU men’s program working his way up the ladder from video coordinator to director of operations, will replace Erik Martin on the Mountaineers’ coaching staff.
Martin became the head coach at South Carolina State on July 11.
Eilert’s first coaching contract will see him earn $180,000, plus incentives. It is a one-year deal.
In comparison, that’s possibly pennies on the dollar compared to what Eilert’s potential was in the financial world.
It’s here we flash back to 2004. Eilert, 41, did achieve his dream of playing Division I hoops as a walk-on at Kansas State, where he earned his degree in marketing and finance.
His first year out of college, Eilert was working as a loan officer in Seneca, Kan., where the numbers in his life now meant dollars and not points per game.
“I was behind a desk for a year and I was working my financial part of my mind, always weighing risks and stuff like that,” Eilert said.
His heart was in basketball, though, and Eilert’s wife Brandi knew it, too.
“My wife sat down with me one night and we talked about what was going to make me happy,” Eilert said. “She was like, ‘Look, you’re still young, so you have the opportunity to go out and find what will make you happy,’ ” Eilert said. “If I was ever going to take a chance in life, that was the time to do it.”
Eilert’s leap of faith took him back to Kansas State, where he became a graduate assistant for his old coach Jim Woolridge, as he began work on his master’s degree.
After that first season as a GA, Woolridge was fired and Huggins entered Eilert’s life for the first time.
“That whole time was a whirlwind,” Eilert said. “Huggs came in and was meeting everyone and it just seemed like he was flying by.”
He stopped at Eilert’s desk and got a glimpse of Brandi’s picture, and as Eilert tells the story, he sort of knew then that he had made the right decision to get back into basketball.
“He saw Brandi’s picture and goes, ‘If you can pick her up, you’re going to be a great recruiter one day,’ ” Eilert said.
Huggins was still living out of a hotel at the time, while the rest of his family was back in Cincinnati.
“He came in one day with a big bag of laundry and asked if I could help him out with it,” Eilert said. “I guess that was my first test, at least that’s what I tell people. My first test working for Bob Huggins was cleaning his underwear.”
Eilert stayed on as a GA under Huggins and then came to Morgantown when Huggins was hired at WVU in 2007.
Since then, Eilert’s worked his way up from the guy in charge of filming practices and getting film of opposing teams to being in charge of scheduling games each season, a duty he’ll still have while also serving as an assistant coach.
His first recruiting trip as a full-time assistant took him to Chicago to evaluate players at an AAU tournament.
Suddenly he was sitting in seats right next to assistants and head coaches at major schools around the country, all of them looking for the next player to make an impact on their basketball programs.
“I had kind of been through it before in 2017 when Ronnie (Everhart, WVU assistant) was out with his back injury,” Eilert said. “I had stepped in then and was basically following around Oscar (Tshiebwe, former WVU recruit) around from one tournament to the next.
“This was a little different, because now this was my way of life. I was picking guys’ brains and just listening to different advice. It was kind of a surreal feeling.”
Eilert’s goals are to one day become a head coach, but that is down the road.
For now, he’s still learning, still figuring the ins and outs of what it takes to be a good basketball coach. What he knows for sure is it beats sitting behind a desk at some bank in Kansas.
“I do sometimes wonder how things would have turned out if I had stayed in finance,” Eilert said. “I still pay attention to the markets, and yeah, there’s money to be made there for sure.
“That wasn’t where my passion was, though. I wanted to be able to make a bigger impact on the lives of young people. When you can help someone else reach their goals, there’s no greater feeling than that.”
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