Quick Hits: Progress Report, Defending the Paint and More

West Virginia University head coach Darian DeVries gives some insight through the first two weeks of practice.

West Virginia head coach Darian DeVries / Christopher Hall - West Virginia on SI

The West Virginia University men's basketball team is working through its second week of preseason practice and head coach Darian Devries sat with the media on Thursday and gave his thoughts on the team's progress.

Progress through the first two weeks of practice

I think we’ve made some great progress the last 10 days that’s been really noticeable. I like how are connectivity is improving at both ends of the floor. I think we’re getting closer to being ready to play a game. We’ve made some good strides the last couple of weeks.

Offense and defense install

We still have plenty of stuff that we got to get done – zone offense and defense, late game situations still are the things that we still got to get implemented and get installed before we got to that position. We got the bulk of all of our stuff and now its just tidying up all the loose ends.

Coaching a group entirely made up of transfers

It certainly adds challenges when you have as many new faces as we have, in addition to new coaching staff, no returners from the previous team, even though we had one anyway. The good part for me is I’ve done it twice now. My first year at Drake we brough in 10 new guys and my last year at Drake we brought in something very similar. So, we’ve had to do it before. It certainly leads to more time in attention to detail you have to spend on some things with just terminology and that kind of stuff. The fact we had our trip to Italy I think helped this summer just to give us a little extra time to work on some of those things – spend a little bit of time on some of the concepts and stuff.

Mountaineer frontcourt

We’ll be just a little undersized, so we’ll have to get creative with the way we defend in the post, the way we rebound. We need to be physical but then we’re also going to have times where we have to send another body to go provide some help down there. We’ll put a lot of time and we have been putting a lot of time in on being able to trap the post and play off of that and some nights we’ll be able to play straight up but there’s going to be these other nights where we are going to need to bring an extra body to bring some help, which means we’re going to have get great at rotations and communications and all those other little things.