Quick Hits: Team Chemistry, Finding an Identity, Injury Updates and More

West Virginia University head coach Darian DeVries provides updates from summer practice

Darian DeVries Summer Recap & Italy Preview.mp4 /

West Virginia University head coach Darian DeVries met with the media ahead of the Mountaineers’ trip to Italy for three exhibition games scheduled August 3-8.

Team Chemistry

When you have a whole group of new guys, it takes some time to figure each other out, both as coaches and players. As coaches, you're trying to figure out how to best utilize each guy's individual strengths and put them in the best position and vice versa. The players are trying to figure out what you want from them. So, I felt like over the six, seven weeks, we've made some strides. The biggest thing is just you got to learn how, as a group, how to win together, and that's the part that takes probably the longest time. That's why I'm glad we get summer workouts to work through some of that stuff.

Benefits of playing international exhibition games

I've been on several tours and they're a great opportunity, mostly from just a chance to go see the world. That's something a lot of these guys, myself included, may not ever get the chance to do, to go see places like Italy and, but more importantly, just a chance to get to spend some time outside of basketball in a different type of perspective for with one another and that's what I love about the timing of this trip for us. Got whole new group, a whole new staff, so we get to go spend 10, 11 days on a trip is certainly good timing for us to get to know each other on a more personal level outside of basketball.

Team Identity

What do we want that to be every single day and what does that look like?  Like I've told them, a day like today or even when we just a fan or supporter comes by and watch us, they should be able to leave and know what our identity is and if they can't, then we're not there yet. And so, we're still working on that, with what that looks like, but we want people to leave our gym and talk about how hard we play, talk about how much energy and enthusiasm we play with, how connected we are and those are the type of things that take time. Right now, in the summertime you have a lot of thinking taking place. So, sometimes it's hard to play fast and free when you're having to process stuff in your mind because you get bogged down trying to learn new plays new terminology. When you only have essentially one guy, which was (senior forward) Tucker (DeVries) that knows any of the stuff that we ran before, everybody's learning new stuff. Even some of the good portion of the staff is learning new terminology, new ways that we're trying to do things. So, again, it's a process. It takes some time. That's why I’m glad we don’t play till November.

Playing undersized

Love to have size and sometimes you don't have it. So, how do you offset it? There's still a physicality that can make that a more even benchmark for us and that's the piece that we're growing into and learning to understand is if we're going to be undersized, you got to do certain things to make sure that we can still survive on the glass, to make sure we can survive guarding then the ball, whatever those things may be and there are’nt any shortcuts to it. And even in a scrimmage like today, where you see one team get up by 17,18, they're making shots and other team wasn't. But it's more about how do you stay in those games when you're not making shots? And that's why you have to rely on your defense, you have to rely on rebounding because you're not going to shoot it well every night. So, you need to be able to stay in those games and find a different way to win and that's the best formula is to guard better and rebound better.

Injury Update

Tucker DeVries

He didn’t get cleared until last week. It was the first time he got to play with full contact, so it was almost four months that he wasn’t allowed to do a whole lot of anything that had contact in it and we’re still being somewhat careful with it. We’re picking and choosing some spots in some rebounding drills and things like that. I believe it was last Tuesday he got full clearance for contact.

Joseph Yesufu

So far, he’s right on schedule. We’ll continue to hopefully make progress there. I think he feels good about where he’s at. I think when we come back from the Italy trip, our plan is to start to work him in to some halfcourt stuff, some drill work and then kind of take it from there. So, about the start of school, starting to get him back on the floor again.