A Mountaineer again
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Thirty years after playing his last game for West Virginia, Bob Huggins has come home to coach the Mountaineers.
Just two days after coach John Beilein left West Virginia for Michigan, WVU found a replacement in Huggins, a Morgantown-born alum who left Kansas State after one season to return to his roots.
A handful of students wearing blue and gold waited to greet him at the Morgantown airport Thursday night, one holding a poster with the words "Welcome home, Coach Huggins" scrawled in blue marker.
But Huggins' plane instead landed in Charleston, some 300 miles away. He got into a car and left without speaking to reporters. The school did issue a news release.
"I'm incredibly happy to be coming back to West Virginia," Huggins said in the statement. "I left a great situation at Kansas State with wonderful people who are as close to West Virginia people as you can get."
Huggins, who played from 1975-77 and was a graduate assistant at West Virginia, once turned down a chance to take the Mountaineers' job when he was at Cincinnati. He couldn't turn down his alma mater again.
"I am so happy to have Bob Huggins back at West Virginia," West Virginia athletic director Ed Pastilong said in the news release. "Bob's record speaks for itself."
Andy Underwood, a 23-year-old senior from Elkins, hopes some high-profile Kansas State recruits will follow Huggins to Morgantown.
"It was a tough blow losing coach Beilein ... but we're pretty excited now," he said.
Kansas State officials did not share their excitement.
"I asked him, 'Bob, do you think leaving now is the right thing to do?' And he said, 'No,"' athletic director Tim Weiser said Thursday at a news conference. "Then I said, 'How many times in your life have you known what the right thing is to do and not done it?' And he said, 'Never."'
