MORGANTOWN — There is a thought that’s been running around in my head the last few days, one that came about as Randy Mazey was surveying the scene at his final press conference as WVU’s baseball coach last week.
His Mountaineers had just been eliminated in the super regional — the final 16 in the country — which you already know by now is the furthest any WVU baseball team has ever advanced.
Certainly other WVU programs have gone further and been ranked higher in the national polls.
Don Nehlen took the WVU football team to the national championship game in 1989 and was robbed of a second opportunity in 1994.
Bob Huggins took the men’s hoops team to the Final Four in 2010. I still believe that if Joe Alexander had returned for his senior season, Huggins and WVU would’ve been there a year earlier in 2009.
So, it wasn’t exactly the overall baseball team’s accomplishments that had me thinking, but rather the journey it took to get there.
It is in that sense where history will judge Mazey most favorably.
And my thought is simple: Going back over the last 50 years, no coach of a major sport (football, basketball or baseball) at WVU was ever put in a worse spot and overcame it as much as Mazey did in taking the Mountaineers to an elite level.
And we certainly have some interesting candidates that include historic ones in Nehlen, Gale Catlett and Mike Carey, a start-from-scratch one in Kittie Blakemore, a meteoric rise in Mark Kellogg, as well as a purely unfortunate candidate in Josh Eilert.
It is a long list, to be sure, and it is a research project that rekindles as much amazement as it does controversy.
There have been hard times along the way, hence the reason for the coaching changes to begin with.
John Beilein (men’s basketball) came into our lives in 2002 after the disaster who was Dan Dakich, who had committed to become the coach, only to leave after eight days.
Dana Holgorsen became the head football coach in 2011 only after the school investigated leaks to the media that eventually caused then-coach Bill Stewart to retire a year earlier than expected.
Stewart, himself, became the football coach after Rich Rodriguez left the school high and dry and abruptly left for Michigan.
Ah, yes, good times.
Kellogg unexpectedly became the women’s hoops coach last year, because Dawn Plitzuweit pulled a Rodriguez after just one year at the school.
Point is, rarely has there been a major coaching change at WVU that didn’t come with some sort of statewide distaste at worst, curiosity at best.
And then there was what Mazey walked into.
He is not the father of WVU baseball. Certainly there were legendary coaches such as Ira Rodgers, Steve Harrick and Dale Ramsburg before him. All of them experienced great levels of success in their own right.
Instead, Mazey became the modern pioneer of the program, one who saw neglect and disrepair and yet still took the job anyway and took it to new heights.
Mazey’s Point A at WVU is what sets him apart from so many of the other coaches.
Nehlen had a brand-new Mountaineer Field to play with and sell to recruits.
Blakemore had a brand-new WVU Coliseum — built just four years before the start of the women’s program — in which to gain some footing.
The Coliseum was still only 8 years old by the time Catlett took over the men’s program.
Mazey had Hawley Field, a dressing room beyond left field in the Shell Building and a small office in the Coliseum.
For those who never had the pleasure of spending an afternoon at Hawley, it was no more suitable for major college baseball than I am for a Pulitzer.
WVU adjusted to Big 12 baseball literally on the fly. Never before had it sponsored a full allotment of scholarships (the NCAA limit for baseball is 11.7 scholarships) and it had strongly considered dropping baseball as a sport altogether in the months before it hired Mazey in 2012.
There have been a number of uncertain times for new WVU coaches.
Last year, Eilert had to take over the men’s hoops team in the middle of the summer after Huggins was forced to resign following a Cincinnati radio interview filled with anti-gay and anti-Catholic slurs and then a DUI arrest.
Current coach Darian DeVries had to rebuild a roster that was left with just one player for a program still reeling a bit from Huggins’ resignation and coming off a school-record 23 losses.
Pretty sure, though, WVU athletic officials never toyed with the idea of dropping the men’s basketball program along the way. Never once did it consider limiting the scholarships for the program.
Mazey dealt with the negatives and kept his vision for the future.
WVU eventually gave him all 11.7 scholarships to work with and then came a new stadium three years later that also included amenities such as new offices, locker rooms, team-meeting spaces and a weight room.
Suddenly, WVU was much closer to being on par with the big boys of college baseball, and Mazey lived up to that with four NCAA tournaments, a Big 12 championship and an appearance in a super regional this year.
So many WVU coaches have overcome some sort of adversity in their historic journeys. Still, the view from here is none of them have a story to tell quite like Mazey does.
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