By Bill Koch
West Virginia head coach Bob Huggins will go for his 900th career win on Saturday afternoon when the Mountaineers take on Oklahoma State in Morgantown.
Huggins recorded 399 of those wins while coaching at UC from 1989 until 2005. Sixteen years after he was fired by UC president Nancy Zimpher, he remains No. 1 in wins among all UC head coaches by a wide margin. Mick Cronin, a former Huggins assistant at UC and now the head coach at UCLA, is second with 296.
When Huggins hits the 900-win mark, he’ll join Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim, former UConn coach Jim Calhoun, former Indiana coach Bob Knight, and North Carolina coach Roy Williams in that elite group. Huggins is the only one of that group who’s not in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.
Huggins began his head-coaching career at Walsh College. He also coached at Akron before he was hired by UC athletic director Rick Taylor to replace Tony Yates.
“I had not known Huggins at all,” Taylor told me in a recent conversation. “The AD at Akron, Jim Dennison, said, ‘You’ll love this guy. He’s a football coach coaching basketball.’ We met in a hotel room halfway between Cincinnati and Akron and we hit it off. He was a great coach.”
After he left Cincinnati, Huggins spent one season as the head coach at Kansas State before West Virginia, his alma mater, hired him in 2007.
I have a treasure trove of Huggins stories from my 16 years of covering him at UC. Here’s one of them:
In 1997, Huggins was ejected from a game against Tulane with 10:34 left in the first half at Fogelman Arena in New Orleans. Except for halftime, when he was permitted to join his team in the locker room, he wasn’t allowed to have any contact with his players or assistant coaches during the rest of the game.
At the time, I worked for the Cincinnati Post. Because we had no Sunday paper, I was always looking for a different angle from Saturday games for the Monday paper, so I waited for Huggins to come out of the locker room and asked him where he planned to watch the second half. He said he was going into the TV production truck, which was parked just outside the arena. Then I asked him if he would mind if I joined him in the truck for the second half. He said he didn’t care, as long as it was OK with the production people.
When he went inside the truck, I went to fetch my notebook. Shortly after the second half started, I knocked on the door of the truck. There was a lot of commotion and noise inside the truck when the door was opened.
“Who are you?” a guy said.
I explained who I was and told him that Huggins said it was OK for me to sit in there.
“Coach,” he yelled, “did you give this guy permission to sit in here?”
Huggins confirmed that he had and I was rather abruptly ordered to sit somewhere out of the way and to be quiet. Clearly, I was not welcome.
Huggins sat in the corner, occasionally coughing and wheezing with a cold, and mumbling about his players’ failure to box out. The Bearcats trailed by one point with 20 seconds left. After a timeout, they broke from their huddle and walked back onto the court for what they hoped would be their final possession of the game.
Huggins leaned forward on his chair as he stared at the bank of monitors the production crew was studying.
“They’ve got to go to Darnell (Burton),” he said, “but Tulane’s defending the double screen pretty well.”
UC put the ball in play and Burton dribbled it up the court.
“What is Darnell doing bringing the ball up court?” Huggins said in disbelief.
Burton then passed to point guard Keith LeGree. Huggins relaxed. “They’re running a special for Darnell,” he said.
Those were his last words before Burton launched the game winning 3-point shot from deep in the corner that gave the Bearcats a 65-63 win. There was no reaction from Huggins as the shot went in. He just stood up, walked out of the truck and headed back into the arena.
Huggins had questioned only one decision by his coaching staff during the entire second half. He thought forward Danny Fortson should have been taken out on defense late in the game when he had four fouls.
“Why not take Fortson out?” he said. “And they’ve got him matched up with (Jerald) Honeycutt, too. They’re going to take it right to him and try to foul him out.”
Sure enough, the ball went to Honeycutt, but Fortson blocked Honeycutt’s shot. Fortson did foul out moments later, though, on the offensive end.
Occasionally during the second half, the director asked Huggins which play the Bearcats were going to run or whether he thought UC should bring Fortson back into the game. Huggins helped when he could, but basically he was a spectator, just like the TV viewers in Cincinnati. There was one major difference: Huggins knew what he was talking about.
West Virginia head coach Bob Huggins will go for his 900th career win on Saturday afternoon when the Mountaineers take on Oklahoma State in Morgantown.
Huggins recorded 399 of those wins while coaching at UC from 1989 until 2005. Sixteen years after he was fired by UC president Nancy Zimpher, he remains No. 1 in wins among all UC head coaches by a wide margin. Mick Cronin, a former Huggins assistant at UC and now the head coach at UCLA, is second with 296.
When Huggins hits the 900-win mark, he’ll join Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim, former UConn coach Jim Calhoun, former Indiana coach Bob Knight, and North Carolina coach Roy Williams in that elite group. Huggins is the only one of that group who’s not in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.
Huggins began his head-coaching career at Walsh College. He also coached at Akron before he was hired by UC athletic director Rick Taylor to replace Tony Yates.
“I had not known Huggins at all,” Taylor told me in a recent conversation. “The AD at Akron, Jim Dennison, said, ‘You’ll love this guy. He’s a football coach coaching basketball.’ We met in a hotel room halfway between Cincinnati and Akron and we hit it off. He was a great coach.”
After he left Cincinnati, Huggins spent one season as the head coach at Kansas State before West Virginia, his alma mater, hired him in 2007.
I have a treasure trove of Huggins stories from my 16 years of covering him at UC. Here’s one of them:
In 1997, Huggins was ejected from a game against Tulane with 10:34 left in the first half at Fogelman Arena in New Orleans. Except for halftime, when he was permitted to join his team in the locker room, he wasn’t allowed to have any contact with his players or assistant coaches during the rest of the game.
At the time, I worked for the Cincinnati Post. Because we had no Sunday paper, I was always looking for a different angle from Saturday games for the Monday paper, so I waited for Huggins to come out of the locker room and asked him where he planned to watch the second half. He said he was going into the TV production truck, which was parked just outside the arena. Then I asked him if he would mind if I joined him in the truck for the second half. He said he didn’t care, as long as it was OK with the production people.
When he went inside the truck, I went to fetch my notebook. Shortly after the second half started, I knocked on the door of the truck. There was a lot of commotion and noise inside the truck when the door was opened.
“Who are you?” a guy said.
I explained who I was and told him that Huggins said it was OK for me to sit in there.
“Coach,” he yelled, “did you give this guy permission to sit in here?”
Huggins confirmed that he had and I was rather abruptly ordered to sit somewhere out of the way and to be quiet. Clearly, I was not welcome.
Huggins sat in the corner, occasionally coughing and wheezing with a cold, and mumbling about his players’ failure to box out. The Bearcats trailed by one point with 20 seconds left. After a timeout, they broke from their huddle and walked back onto the court for what they hoped would be their final possession of the game.
Huggins leaned forward on his chair as he stared at the bank of monitors the production crew was studying.
“They’ve got to go to Darnell (Burton),” he said, “but Tulane’s defending the double screen pretty well.”
UC put the ball in play and Burton dribbled it up the court.
“What is Darnell doing bringing the ball up court?” Huggins said in disbelief.
Burton then passed to point guard Keith LeGree. Huggins relaxed. “They’re running a special for Darnell,” he said.
Those were his last words before Burton launched the game winning 3-point shot from deep in the corner that gave the Bearcats a 65-63 win. There was no reaction from Huggins as the shot went in. He just stood up, walked out of the truck and headed back into the arena.
Huggins had questioned only one decision by his coaching staff during the entire second half. He thought forward Danny Fortson should have been taken out on defense late in the game when he had four fouls.
“Why not take Fortson out?” he said. “And they’ve got him matched up with (Jerald) Honeycutt, too. They’re going to take it right to him and try to foul him out.”
Sure enough, the ball went to Honeycutt, but Fortson blocked Honeycutt’s shot. Fortson did foul out moments later, though, on the offensive end.
Occasionally during the second half, the director asked Huggins which play the Bearcats were going to run or whether he thought UC should bring Fortson back into the game. Huggins helped when he could, but basically he was a spectator, just like the TV viewers in Cincinnati. There was one major difference: Huggins knew what he was talking about.
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