MORGANTOWN — As we sit here still a number of hours shy from a Thanksgiving feast, no college basketball team — men or women — has yet to play its 10th game of the season.
In that sense, the national rankings mean very little to any team. By nature, that’s what coaches and players of any team will tell you, as they should.
“It’s still very early,” is the way WVU women’s coach Mark Kellogg put it Tuesday, as his 12th-ranked Mountaineers prepared to hit the road to play in the Gulf Coast Showcase, a tournament that could eventually lead WVU to a showdown with No. 5 Texas.
Yet there is a story to be told here with this group of Mountaineers and their No. 12 ranking, the highest WVU has been slotted since hitting No. 9 during the 2017-18 season.
It’s a story that is simply told by simply scanning WVU’s roster.
The Mountaineers (6-0) are a mixture of, well, just about everything. There are freshmen, junior-college recruits and international-born players.
There are players who came to Morgantown from the portal and then there is star guard J.J. Quinerly, who came to WVU as a 4-star freshman four years ago and stuck it out through two coaching changes.
If you were to break all of that down, what makes this team and its ranking special is the Mountaineers are mostly a collection of athletes who never had this type of opportunity before.
“I feel like its a testament to how hard everyone has worked, whether its individually and getting to the gym to get up extra shots and stuff like that,” WVU forward Tirzah Moore said. “I feel like it brings us all back to the team. We’ve worked hard in practice. We see each other day in and day out coming in and working hard.
“It’s a good number to see. It’s encouraging.”
Moore came to WVU last season from Oral Roberts, where she could have scored hundreds of points and grabbed hundreds of rebounds, but none of them were going to get the Golden Eagles ranked No. 12 in the country.
Jordan Harrison would have been a star at Stephen F. Austin. Kyah Watson once beat a powerhouse Baylor team in the 2022 NCAA tournament as a sophomore at South Dakota.
Stephen F. Austin and South Dakota — as solid as those mid-major programs are — will never experience the feeling of being ranked No. 12 in the country.
So, you’ll have to pardon me for calling hogwash on the whole rankings-don’t-mean-anything-now type of talk.
Not with this team. Not with these players.
“I think we have a lot of kids who are in that similar situation,” said Kellogg, who came to WVU last season from Stephen F. Austin. “You have a coach, too, from the mid-major level who has worked his whole career to be in this situation.
“There are a few times I’ll sit back and say, ‘That’s pretty cool, we’re the 12th-ranked team in the country.’ I still think it’s hard to get there, but harder to stay there. We just want to continue to try and get better and win big games whenever they come.”
It’s easy for the schools like UConn or South Carolina to take the rankings for granted. It’s become a birthright of sorts for those programs, deservedly so.
WVU is on a climb to get there. There is nothing taken for granted, at least that’s the message Kellogg preaches to his players.
That includes the top 25 ranking, in that this WVU bunch knows there is work to be done, but it doesn’t hurt to enjoy the scenery at the moment.
“I think this is definitely a special group,” Quinerly said. “It’s special for us to look and see our name in the top 25. I think that’s a good look for us and will give us a lot of confidence moving forward.”
