Jalen Bridges Explains Why He Left West Virginia
Jalen Bridges' decision to enter the transfer portal came as a surprise to many, but the destination, Baylor, was even more surprising.
In a recent interview with the Final Fourcast, Bridges detailed why he made the decision to leave WVU and openly talked about how he was "mentally checked out" toward the end of the season after going through two seven-game losing streaks.
"I'd rather be taught than just yelled at. I can take yelling if there's teaching too and not saying there was no teaching, it was just they'd rather yell at you and put on the treadmill rather than show you what to do and how to fix it and not make that same mistake again. It's like a punishment over trying to get better. I feel like I regressed as a player honestly. That was a bad representation of my game and I'm just trying to rebrand myself."
When asked if anything could have happened to prevent Bridges from leaving, he said that it's possible things would've went differently if Coach Huggins didn't blow off a one on one meeting with him multiple times to discuss what was truly on his mind. Bridges said Huggins would pull him off to the side a few seconds before practice to ask if he was doing okay but Bridges wanted to have the conversation in a more private setting.
The main point that Bridges wanted to get across was that he felt he was being misused. "Everybody talking about me like I'm a big. I ain't ever been a damn big my entire life. I was a shooting guard in high school." Bridges feels like the combination of playing in a system where he isn't "hunting" shots and can be developed as a player will be the best situation for him in order to have a chance of making it to the NBA.
"When you look at it from a basketball perspective and when you look at what Scott Drew has done with people like me, he's consistently developed them and made them into pros. I feel like I was just mentally drained, I felt like I needed to get out of there. It's a completely different system, a completely different offense. I've never been out of West Virginia in my entire life and I needed a break, I need something a little different. It was really between Alabama and Baylor. I feel like if I would've went to Bama, I would have had too much fun. I want to be somewhere where I can lock in and really just work on my game and try to get better."
As much as Bridges knew he needed a change of scenery, it's not something he wanted to do. He wanted to make it work, but it just got to a point to where there was just too much negativity and wanted to get away from it. Some of the negativity came from outside of the program as well. Fans on Twitter had directly messaged Bridges' girlfriend numerous times after games and that did not sit well with Bridges. Although it wasn't the determining factor of his decision to leave, "it made a bad situation worse."
"Everybody is going to have something to say regardless. You've just got to block all that extra noise out. The tweet I had the other day that fans don't matter, it wasn't saying like nobody cares about the fans. I'm just saying, like, their opinions don't matter that much to make somebody transfer. It's deeper than that. It's some real problems that went on. That's why I'm transferring."
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