West Virginia University men’s basketball coach Bob Huggins will be inducted into the sport’s hall of fame this year.
Updated on Monday, April 4, 2022 at 11:30 a.m.
West Virginia University men’s basketball coach Bob Huggins will be inducted into the sport’s hall of fame this year.
Huggins was amongst the 13 honorees in the The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame Class of 2022 announced Saturday, April 2 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
The Enshrinement event will take place September 9-10 in Springfield, Massachusetts.
National sports reporter for The Athletic Shams Charania broke the story Thursday night that Huggins would be inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in September.
Fellow 2022 inductees include National Basketball Association (NBA) players Tim Hardaway and Manu Ginobili, Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) star Swin Cash, and NBA coach George Karl.
WVPB reached out to the Hall of Fame and WVU Communications to confirm, but they did not immediately respond.
A Morgantown native, Huggins was named head men’s basketball coach at WVU in 2007. During his tenure, he led the team to 326 victories and 10 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Tournament appearances.
With 916 wins throughout his collegiate coaching career, Huggins has the eighth-most wins of any basketball coach in NCAA history.
Huggins was announced as a North American committee finalist for the Hall of Fame in February. He will join fellow West Virginians Jerry West and Hal Greer in receiving hall of fame honors.
*Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect Huggins’ official naming to the Hall of Fame on Saturday, April 2.
A bill to restrict transgender girls and women from playing female sports is on its way to Gov. Jim Justice.
The West Virginia House of Delegates voted to accept the Senate’s version of HB 3293 on Friday evening.
The upper chamber’s version gives female student athletes, from middle school to college, the option to sue their county board of education, or their state higher education institution, if they feel there’s been a violation of this bill by having to play with or against a transgender girl or woman.
If the transgender student is a minor, the identity of that student would remain private and anonymous.
The Senate also amended the bill to clarify that the legislation will no longer “restrict the eligibility of any student to participate” in male athletic teams, or those that are co-ed, as long as they “try out and possess the requisite skill to make the team.”
More than two dozen state legislatures including West Virginia have introduced similar legislation this year. West Virginia House Democrats on Friday spoke against the effort.
“It attempts to harm children,” said Del. Joey Garcia, D-Marion. “It ostracizes some of our most vulnerable children in the state of West Virginia.”
Garcia also questioned if this could hamper the state’s tourism efforts, referring to an incident in 2016 when the National Collegiate Athletic Association pulled its planned championship events from North Carolina venues, after the state imposed bathroom restrictions on its transgender residents and visitors. The NCAA returned to North Carolina after the state partially repealed the ban in 2017.
“They had to go back and fix it,” Garcia said. “They had to go back and fix it because they actually cared about tourism.”
Others who have opposed the bill, including Sen. Ryan Weld, R-Brooke, have said provisions for college athletes in the Senate’s version of HB 3293 conflict with the NCAA’s policy enacted in 2011, which allows transgender women to play in their sports.
“I don’t think that people who have a distinct physical, physiological advantage over members of an opposite sex should be allowed to play a sport with them. It’s unfair,” Weld said Thursday on the Senate floor. “But by including higher education, we’ve added another layer of complexity to an issue that is already extremely complex, extremely difficult.”
Meanwhile, Senate Education Chair Patricia Rucker, R-Jefferson, said Thursday that she believes the bill would bring the state into further compliance with Title IX, a law preventing sex-based discrimination, including discrimination against women, in schools and related programs.
“[This] is for the policy of helping our girls, helping our women, have the opportunity. That is what Title IX was about.” Rucker said. “This bill does nothing more than codify what is already well established under federal and state common law: that biological females, and biological males are not similarly situated in certain circumstances, and one of those circumstances is in sports.”
Supporters of the legislation in the House on Friday agreed with Rucker. “This conversation has to do with one thing and one thing only — girls in sports,” said Del. Roger Conley, R-Wood. “Why is it fair that my granddaughter would be on a basketball team with someone that was born a biological male, gets plowed over because they’re much faster, much stronger, [and] gets her leg broken?”
Before the bill reached either floor, however — in both its current version and earlier as it passed the House in March — lawmakers heard testimony from advocacy organizations like the Human Rights Campaign, that say transgender women are just as diverse as other women when it comes to body type and skill.
“They have a variety of different talents. They have a variety of different interests,” said Human Rights Campaign State Legislative Director Cathryn Oakley during a meeting with the House Judiciary Committee in February. “Some of them will be tall, some of them are short, some of them are fast, some of them are slow, some of them will have excellent hand eye coordination, others of them will not.”
While lawmakers who support the bill haven’t publicly identified any situations where schools have had problems with transgender athletes in West Virginia, the bill’s opponents have referred to sources highlighting bullying against transgender youth.
That includes a report by the Trevor Project mentioned last year in Forbes magazine, which said nearly half of the country’s transgender youth have considered suicide in the last year.
“This legislation, it’s just one more nail in the coffin for those students,” said Del. Cody Thompson, D-Randolph, who is gay. “I don’t think anyone in here has ever contemplated suicide for being straight. Definitely crossed my mind. But this bill, it’s unfortunate that this is where we’re at right now, and that we’re going to put into law something that’s going to just tell these young people that you don’t matter. We don’t care.”
Del. Danielle Walker, D-Monongalia, agreed and said she was “sorry” on behalf of the legislature.
“Trans youth are still youth. Children are still children,” said Walker. “Today, I feel like a bully on children … I apologize to my constituents … I stand with you today in front of my colleagues.”
The House voted 80-20 on the measure, and the bill now heads to the governor for consideration. West Virginia Public Broadcasting reached out to the bill’s lead sponsor, Del. Caleb Hanna, R-Nicholas, for comment, but he did not respond before this story was published.
Hanna has not spoken publicly on the floor or in committee on the issue.
House Communications Director Ann Ali told West Virginia Public Broadcasting that because the bill originated in the House Education Committee, Hanna was listed as its lead sponsor due to him serving as committee vice chair that day.
After a plane crash killed most of Marshall University’s football team in 1970, school administrators could have resorted to the simplest choice — dropping the losing sport altogether.
They didn’t. They couldn’t bring themselves to do it.
From the 75 lives lost in the worst sports disaster in U.S. history, the program slowly rebuilt and eventually triumphed. A half-century later, those who lived through the tragedy — some by happenstance, others by fateful decisions that seemed mundane at the time — marvel as they recall the feeling that they had to keep playing.
“We felt the guys would want us to go on,” said Ed Carter, a sophomore offensive lineman who was supposed to be on the team plane but wasn’t. “We just felt we needed to continue the program.”
The team’s long, determined crawl back to success was chronicled in the 2006 movie “We Are Marshall ” — a title borrowed from the chants that resonate at Thundering Herd games. Today the team is undefeated and ranked No. 16 heading into Saturday’s home game with Middle Tennessee.
“It has been real special to see how that program has been turned around.” Carter said.
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FILE – In this Nov. 15, 1970, file photo, a fireman looks over the wreckage of a plane in Kenova near Huntington, W.Va. Marshall will mark the 50th anniversary of the plane crash that killed all 75 aboard on Saturday, Nov. 14, 2020, on the campus in Huntington.
In the first season after the crash, Marshall won just two games. The first winning season didn’t come for another 13 years. Then success occurred in streaks.
Marshall captured Division I-AA national championships in 1992 and 1996 and amassed the most wins of any team in the nation in the 1990s, many of them during a step up into Division I-A under coach Bob Pruett. An athlete named Randy Moss started a journey there that would redefine what was possible in terms of speed, power and size at the wide receiver position.
The success continues now in the Bowl Subdivision under coach Doc Holliday, who is 6-1 in bowl games and won a Conference USA championship in 2014.
The plane crash redefined comebacks and helped shape the identity of the public university that serves 13,000 students in Huntington.
“It’s who we are,” said athletic director Mike Hamrick, who played linebacker from 1976 to 1979. “There’s not been a comeback story like Marshall football.”
Marshall’s chartered DC-9 was returning from a game at East Carolina on Nov. 14, 1970, when it slammed into a hillside in rain and fog just short of the Huntington airport runway. The jet burst into flames, leaving a charred swath of trees. Investigators concluded that the plane was flying too low, either because of faulty altitude equipment or the pilots’ failure to read their instruments properly.
Everyone on board perished: 36 football players, 39 coaches, school administrators, community leaders, boosters and the flight crew.
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A memorial plaque is displayed at the site of a 1970 plane crash that killed 75 people, including 36 Marshall football players Oct. 24, 2020, near Huntington, W.Va. The Nov. 14, 1970 crash remains the worst sports disaster in U.S. history.
It happened a month after a plane carrying the Wichita State football team crashed in Colorado, killing 31 people, including 14 players. The Shockers football program was discontinued in 1986.
Those not on the Marshall plane have spent the last five decades dealing with heartache, self-doubt and unanswerable questions about why they were spared.
Three players — linebacker Dennis Foley and linemen Carter and Pete Naputano — were among the living but were mistakenly listed with the victims in newspaper obituaries and hometown tributes.
Foley, who was sitting out the 1970 season after hurting an ankle playing summer basketball, was one of several injured players who stayed in Huntington.
After a failed attempt to reach the crash site, he returned to campus. His roommate, kicker Marcelo Lajterman, was among the dead. That night, Foley was introduced to another student who would become his wife.
Carter had visited Texas for his father’s funeral. His mother asked him to stay a few days, and Carter obliged, missing the East Carolina trip. And yet his name remained on the passenger list. A friend who saw Carter back on campus panicked and ran screaming. He ran after her to prove he wasn’t a ghost.
A few other injured players were told at the last minute that school boosters would take their place on the plane. Cornerback and co-captain Nate Ruffin, who died of leukemia in 2001, never learned who took his seat.
“To this date, we didn’t know — nor did we care to find out — who got added to the trip,” Ruffin told The Associated Press in a 2000 interview.
Instead, the players who were left behind were called upon to identify crash victims through clothing, jewelry, shoes — even scars. Ruffin became an impromptu team spokesman, answering frantic queries from players’ parents.
There were too many funerals to attend. Six players whose bodies were never identified were buried at a nearby cemetery.
A pall of grief and skepticism hung over a program, which had a perennial losing record in the 1960s and had been placed on NCAA probation for recruiting violations in 1969. But acting university President Donald Dedmon and others quickly decided to keep football going.
Jack Lengyel, the coach hired in 1971 to usher Marshall into a new era, said the decision was “based on faith.”
They started from scratch. A ragtag group that included three dozen walk-ons, former servicemen, a soccer player, basketball players and transfer students joined the few returning athletes who were not on the plane. Some returning freshmen who were not allowed to play the previous fall due to NCAA restrictions helped fill out the team.
Ten months after the crash, in the second game of the following season, in what is still considered the biggest victory in program history, Marshall defeated Xavier, 15-13, at home by scoring a touchdown on the final play. Freshman fullback Terry Gardner caught a screen pass from Reggie Oliver and went 13 yards for the score.
Fans stormed the field in celebration.
Lengyel, now 86, gives talks to residents of the Maryland senior facility where he lives after showings of the film in which he is portrayed by Matthew McConaughey.
“The Marshall people are like a fist,” Lengyel said. “They support their athletic programs, and they always did. In the time of tragedy, they came together like a fist. They believed in the program and brought it from the ashes to the glory.”
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FILE – In this Nov. 19, 2005, file photo, Nov. 19, 2005, a of the Memorial Fountain at Marshall University’s student center adorns quarterback Jimmy Skinner’s helmet in Huntington, W.Va. The fountain is dedicated to the memory of 75 people killed in a Nov. 14, 1970, plane crash. Among the victims were 36 Marshall football players.
A memorial fountain on Marshall’s campus is shaped like a tulip. Each rod represents one of the 75 crash victims. At a solemn ceremony every Nov. 14, the fountain is turned off. It’s turned back on every spring.
According to the university, sculptor Harry Bertoia said it was his wish that the fountain would “commemorate the living — rather than death — on the waters of life, rising, receding, surging so as to express upward growth, immortality and eternality.”
Like Foley, who met his wife amid the tragedy, Carter found purpose over the next five decades. Not religious at the time of the crash, he became a Christian. He’s preached the gospel for decades and started a ministry with his family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
“A lot of people wondered why that (crash) happened to this day,” Carter said. “I don’t know. Why did the Lord leave me? I know that now.”
Houston hired West Virginia’s Dana Holgorsen as its coach Wednesday, ending his eight-year run with the Mountaineers.
Holgorsen was 61-41 and 33-30 in the Big 12 as he helped guide West Virginia through the transition from the Big East. Houston competes in the American Athletic Conference, which was formed from the remnants of Big East football after it was torn apart by realignment earlier this decade.
Holgorsen spent two seasons as Houston’s offensive coordinator in 2008-09, when it was in Conference USA, before serving a season in the same position under Mike Gundy at Oklahoma State in 2010.
“We are thrilled to welcome Dana back to Houston as the next leader of our football program. His offensive acumen with an emphasis on student-athlete development, on and off the field, is a perfect fit for our program, university and city,” athletic director Chris Pezman said.
Houston fired coach Major Applewhite on Sunday after two underwhelming seasons. Applewhite, who took a school-friendly deal in 2016 to replace Tom Herman, went 15-11.
Holgorsen is making a unique move, leaving a Power Five school for one outside the high revenue conferences. No coach has willingly made that move since the College Football Playoff was established in 2014.
But Holgorsen was in a tricky spot at West Virginia. He had probably has most talented team in Morgantown, West Virginia, this season. Led by quarterback Will Grier, the Mountaineers were in contention for a Big 12 title and playoff spot entering November.
They fell short of a spot in the Big 12 title game, losing to Oklahoma at home in the regular-season finale to finish 8-3. With Grier and star offensive tackle Yodny Cajuste sitting out, the Mountaineers lost the Camping World Bowl to Syracuse last week. West Virginia is facing a significant rebuild next season with Grier, Cajuste, star receiver David Sills V and linebacker David Long all headed to the NFL.
Houston has been trying to work its way into a Power Five conference, preferably the Big 12, and is hoping Holgorsen can help make them a viable option in a process in which the school has little control.
Holgorsen is two years into a contract that runs through the 2021 season and pays him $3.5 million per year. Houston will owe West Virginia a $1 million buyout.
“I want to thank coach Holgorsen for his eight years at West Virginia,” West Virginia athletic director Shane Lyons said. “Our national search for his replacement has already begun, and I know it will be a successful one.”
Holgorsen initially was hired as West Virginia’s offensive coordinator and head coach-in waiting in December 2010. Fans were never fully enamored with Holgorsen after he replaced the popular Bill Stewart at the start of the 2011 season. A month after an intoxicated Holgorsen was escorted out of a West Virginia casino, he was named Stewart’s replacement after a former sports writer said Stewart approached him shortly after Holgorsen’s hiring to “dig up dirt” on his eventual successor.
Inheriting players recruited by Stewart, West Virginia beat Clemson 70-33 in the Orange Bowl after the 2011 season to finish 10-3. Holgorsen was given a five-year contract extension at the end of the 2016 regular season, when WVU also went 10-3.
Purdue and West Virginia just missed out on the NCAA Tournament.
The two schools will still be playing in the postseason as they headline the WNIT field that was announced Monday night.
They were among the final eight teams revealed by the NCAA on Sunday night and ended up on the outside of the tournament. Rutgers and Southern Cal also were among the first four teams out of the NCAAs.
Rutgers originally accepted a bid to the WNIT before coach C. Vivian Stringer later decided to not play in it. Stephen F. Austin was chosen to replace the Scarlet Knights. Southern Cal also declined to play in the WNIT.
The 64-team field includes five teams from the Atlantic 10. There are four teams from the Big Ten, Conference USA and the Mountain West.
West Virginia University and Marshall University basketball fans who may be traveling to first-round men’s NCAA Tournament games in San Diego are being urged to use care in ticket purchases.
State Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said in a news release that fans should purchase tickets from the universities or known ticket vendors to ensure their tickets are legitimate.
The release said buyers should use caution to avoid buying from someone who may not provide a ticket.
The attorney general’s office advises buying from a reliable vendor, protecting against identity theft, making sure sellers disclose seat location and ticket accessibility and reading fine print about fees and refunds. The release also says payment with credit cards provides greater ability to dispute unfair or unauthorized charges.
