MORGANTOWN — Curvy roads and Tombstone frozen pizzas may not be exactly what Darian DeVries had in mind when he first took over as the WVU men’s basketball coach back in March.
But, hey, every story has a unique starting point.
“I think I’ve tried just about every place around town,” he said. “I’ve been a bachelor for two months, so it’s been like, where am I going to go tonight? I think I ate pizza and wings for the first 30 days, that’s why I’ve gained about 15 pounds since I’ve been here.”
DeVries just recently settled into a new house. His wife and daughter will be joining him in Morgantown next month. Before that, he was constructing a roster and coaching staff while living out of a hotel.
“I got to the point where I had to stop eating out,” he said. “I had an oven in the room, so I go out to the grocery store. What do I come home with? Nachos and Tombstone pizzas.”
It’s been three months since DeVries was hired at WVU, the man charged with retooling a program that had reached both national heights and severe frustrations under former coach Bob Huggins.
The one-season buffer zone between Huggins and DeVries brought a school-record 23 losses, so there is a lot of room for improvement.
There is a vision in DeVries’ mind as to what the program can be. For now, it’s a vision with a long road ahead before getting to that point.
The roads DeVries navigated growing up in Iowa and then spending 26 years coaching in the Midwest at Creighton (Omaha, Neb.) and Drake (Des Moines, Iowa) are as straight for longer than the eyes can see.
Not so in West Virginia.
“I’ve had to learn how to drive,” he says with a smile. “My heavy foot, I’ve had to learn to pull it back a bit.
“Back home, you can text while you drive, no big deal. The curvy roads are real here.”
So are the mountainous views, the sunsets and the genuine no-nonsense and blue-collar lifestyle. All of it DeVries mentions as he speaks about the state he is still getting to know.
In turn, that state is still trying to get to know DeVries, too.
On paper, he’s an outsider, something Huggins never had to deal with and something no WVU men’s hoops coach going back more than 70 years has had to worry about. Even former coach John Beilein went to college in the state.
Yet there is a sense of great determination in DeVries, and he appears to be very much a no-nonsense and straight-forward guy himself. No, maybe DeVries isn’t from around here, but there’s a feeling he’s fitting in quite nicely.
“The people here, it reminds me a lot of Iowa in that regard,” DeVries said. “They’re just hard-working and good people. They’ve been great to me, very accommodating to me, my family and our guys. They’ve been so welcoming and awesome.”
And they will journey for hours and navigate those curvy roads to see WVU turned back into a winner.
“Just talking with people who don’t live 30 minutes away, they would tell me how they come to the games,” DeVries said. “I was like, ‘Isn’t that a three-and-a-half hour drive?’ They said they still go. That says a lot about how much people care and their passion for it.
“You go from is it real or is it just words? It’s definitely shown through that this is genuinely real and not fake. This is what they care about. I think it’s pretty impressive how this state rallies around this university.”
The questions are still out there, and the book is still wide open on how far DeVries can carry the Mountaineers. It’s just June, he quickly points out, with the first game still five months away. The team will take a foreign trip to Italy before then. His son Tucker — one of 11 newcomers to the WVU roster — is still in the later stages of recovering from shoulder surgery.
It is a program on the mend, but not beaten. That is the feeling DeVries says he carries with him as he navigates the early stages of his journey, curves and all.
“I’m optimistically fired up about it to be honest with you,” he said. “I like the group we have. I think they’re ready to compete. It’s still June, but I think by November they’ll be ready to go compete and win some games. I feel really good about that.”
