West Virginia is ready and excited to start the season

A long offseason is coming to an end and West Virginia is looking forward to the start of the season.

The Mountaineers will open the 2024-25 season against Robert Morris, with the basketball team going into game preparation mode with its scout on Friday.

“Then it will stay like that until March. But our guys are excited to come out and play,” said head coach Darian DeVries.

The head coach tries to keep his team on a routine with the same film work, approach and review when preparing for games to maintain consistency throughout the year.

West Virginia has a good idea of ​​what the rotation will look like heading into the year, with the head coach suggesting it will be between 8 and 10 players, although that is never set in stone. Because injuries and other possibilities can arise, DeVries focuses his players on the fact that they could be there.

“Just play well in practice and continue to put yourself in the best position possible,” he said.

One player who won't be there to start the season is guard Jayden Stone, who will be out for a while with an upper body injury. Stone was injured in practice and his status will change from day to day as he progresses throughout the non-conference schedule.

Expect West Virginia on offense to look to take advantage of what the defense will give them depending on the matchup. The Mountaineers will not commit to a specific assignment and will need to be flexible and demonstrate the ability to adapt depending on the opponent's actions.

The offense will operate the same from game to game, but the way it attacks may vary depending on the opponent on the schedule. The plan is to make sure guys don't act robotically, but instead rely on their instincts to be more effective and quicker on that end of the floor.

“I don't think you want to insist that I think it's an insult. We want to be as flexible as possible,” said DeVries.

The playbook is pretty extensive, but the focus will be on going into each game with about 10-15 types of plays that they believe will work against every opponent and will work in practice. That will be the main focus, but during a game the coaching staff could decide to pull something different depending on what develops.

“I think they play very unselfishly and together. So I'm happy to see that our challenge as we start games now is to do that for 40 minutes every night,” DeVries said.

West Virginia won't experiment much early in the season and will instead focus on what they need to do to win every ballgame. A total of 12 new scholarship players were added this offseason, so there was a lot of time spent getting established on both offense and defense compared to some of his teams at Drake, who returned a lot.

Overall, DeVries likes how selflessly his team plays together, and now he's excited to see how that affects the game's settings. Every team will have times when they struggle, but the focus will be on how they respond in those situations, starting with the opening game.

“Right now I'm excited. I can’t wait to play, get our guys on stage in front of everyone and compete,” he said.