MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — One week from today, West Virginia’s men’s basketball program will face outside competition for the first time under head coach Darian DeVries.
The Mountaineers head to Italy on Wednesday and play their first of three games overseas August 3 at 12:30 p.m. ET against BC Zaligiris Kaunas-2 in Genoa.
“We’ll throw out different lineups to get a look at different things. Some guys will play more or less,” DeVries said. “We’ll try to play the younger guys a little more just to get some post high school experience. You never know what you’re going to get over there. Sometimes you get a great game and really challenged, and sometimes you don’t.
“I just want us to play together and play the way we want them to play every night. I don’t expect it to be great. You travel, we’re not doing a shoot-around, no walkthrough, just go play. It’s the way they like it.”
The Mountaineers are also slated to face Orange1 Bassano on August 6 in Florence before playing their final game of the trip August 8 against Stella#EBK in Rome.
The contests will allow DeVries and the staff he’s assembled to get their first look at a roster with only one scholarship holdover from last season’s WVU team, but they won’t receiver near the same attention as a regular season game.
“They’re going to have five, we’re going to have five and toss ‘er up,” DeVries said. “We’ll figure out who can shoot it by halftime.”
Still, with 12 new players and an entirely new coaching staff, the trip appears to come at an ideal time for West Virginia.
“That’s what I love about the timing of this trip for us,” DeVries said. “We have a whole new group and whole new staff, so to get to go spend ten or eleven days on a trip is certainly good timing for us to get to know each other on a more personal level outside of basketball.”
Only forward Tucker DeVries and guard Joseph Yesufu have previously played for the first-year WVU head coach. It’s been since the 2020-21 campaign for Yesufu, who remains sidelined with a hip injury that sidelined him most of last season at Washington State, though he’s expected to be back not long after the Mountaineers return home.
DeVries is more concerned with his team applying what’s consistently being worked on throughout summer practices in favor of specific results on the foreign trip, though he admits an eagerness to seeing how players respond to certain situations.
“I don’t try to put a lot into it,” he said. “I’ve been on several of these, and some head coaches sit in the stands and watch during these games. I always felt like, especially with a new group, I need to be out there and coach them. But for the most part, try to get them a little bit of a rhythm together and an identity of how we want to play. You also take into account all the travel and all the stuff that goes with it. I don’t have unrealistic expectations of what it’s going to look like. I’d love for it to be a great game.
“Last year, we took our team to Spain at Drake and we got beat in our first game. We were up like 15 with 10 minutes to go and we played the young guys. It was the greatest thing ever, because they had to finish out a game and whether we won or lost wasn’t the point. The point was they were in a situation we were going to see and we got an opportunity to watch how they responded. Hoping we get something like that again on this trip.”
DeVries says there’s also a high likelihood the Mountaineers’ roster increases following the trip from its current 14 players, 12 of which are program newcomers.
“We’re still very much actively recruiting,” he said. “There’s multiple players we’re still trying to recruit and get them here by the start of school.”
