MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (WV News) — The year 2022 will go down in history as a significant one in West Virginia athletics, even if both the football and men's basketball teams finished with sub-.500 records and without postseason play and the women's basketball team also failed to play in the postseason while losing its all-time winningest coach, Mike Carey, to retirement.

Despite those disappointments, there were memorable moments both on and off the field throughout the year.

As we run a series of year-end reviews, the magnitude of how much history was made is found in the year's biggest stories, which we present here.

It begins with the most memorable, if not the most significant, as Bob Huggins, a former Mountaineer player and captain and longtime coach, not only battled his way into third place in all-time basketball victories behind former Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski and Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim but finally earned induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

Presented by WVU Hall of Famers Jerry West and Rod Thorn, Huggins offered a tale he has often told to explain his journey to greatness:

“I got in a truck with this guy one day, and I looked, and he didn’t have a rear mirror. I said, 'You don’t have a rearview mirror,' he said, 'We ain’t going backward, boy.' When I listened to the radio and see if we were going to have school, they said, 'Midvale Mine No. 9 will work.' It was never they won’t work. And that’s how I’ve lived my life — not looking back, and hard work.�

And that is how he is carrying on rebuilding his team this year, through hard work and not looking back, using the transfer portal that he once detested and juco transfers that he leaned heavily on when getting started at Cincinnati to create a team that has gotten off to a big start.

Huggins was not the only former WVU coach to make his way into a Hall of Fame. The man he replaced, John Beilein, who went on to even more success at Michigan than he had in Morgantown from 2002 to 2007, was elected to the College Basketball Hall of Fame in Kansas City.

Speaking of halls of fame, the 2022 class of the WVU Athletic Hall of Fame included Donna Abbott (women’s basketball), Marie-Louise Asselin (cross country/track), Tavon Austin (football), Stedman Bailey (football), Marsha Beasley (rifle), Marilee Hohmann (rifle), Kevin Jones (men’s basketball) and Geno Smith (football).

It was quite a year for WVU alumni in the sports world.

Former baseball star Alek Manoah became one of major league baseball's top pitchers, being named an American League All-Star as he compiled a 16-7 record with a 2.34 ERA. Manoah not only pitched a scoreless inning in the All-Star game with three strikeouts, he became something of a media sensation as he dazzled viewers while mic'd up while on the mound and had clever byplay with Hall of Fame pitcher John Smoltz in the TV booth.

It also was a year where former a WVU quarterback's long wait for success was met as Smith was named Russell Wilson's replacement in Seattle. While there were doubters all around him, he became one of the league's top QBs.

In the NBA, guard Jevon Carter earned a championship ring and became recognized as one of the league's top defenders with Milwaukee while another former WVU guard, Deuce McBride, made his way into playing time with the New York Knicks.

The biggest NBA story of the year, though, may have been former WVU guard Joe Mazzulla being named interim coach of the Boston Celtics for this year and leading the legendary team off to a fast start that well may earn him a contact as the full-time coach of the team.

Another Mountaineer basketball hero, Joe Ruoff, ended his 13-year professional career, most of it overseas, by retiring and starting a coaching career as a graduate assistant for Huggins.

The year's most significant story, however, was far less a sign of success as Shane Lyons, athletic director for seven years, was fired after a "tense" meeting with school president Gordon Gee in the wake of failures in coach Neal Brown's football program.

The team was 21-24 in four years under Brown with only one winning season, and fans were pushing for his dismissal. But a contract extension of two years through 2026 given to Brown after just two seasons of .500 ball on the job included an increased buyout that made firing him too heavy a financial burden.

Brown would have been owed $20 million if fired, so it was decided to hire North Texas athletic director Wren Baker to replace Lyons after a brief search and give him a year to assess Brown and the football program.

The Mountaineers won only five and lost seven, including the Backyard Brawl rivalry to Pitt in the season opener, but they did beat Oklahoma for the first time since joining the Big 12 as the highlight of a difficult season that was marred by injuries, defections to the transfer portal and the failure of hotly-recruited former 5-star quarterback JT Daniels to lift the Mountaineer offense.

Daniels eventually lost his job to Garrett Greene and said he was entering the transfer portal after the season.

Two Mountaineers who didn't disappoint were defensive tackle Dante Stills, who surprised everyone by returning for his final year of eligibility and didn't waste it, and center Zach Frazier, who lived up to his talent.

Stills ended his career breaking linebacker Grant Wiley's record for tackles for a loss with 52.5, which accounted for a record 250 negative yards while finishing fourth in career sacks with 23.5.

The year did introduce a budding superstar in running back CJ Donaldson, whose first carry against Pitt went for 44 yards and who gained more than 100 rushing yards in four of six starts before suffering a season-ending broken ankle.

Carey's departure. said to be a retirement after 21 seasons and a school-record 447 wins, came after his team failed to qualify for the NCAA Tournament and turned down a bid to the WNIT.

Carey was replaced by Dawn Plitzuweit, who was given a five-year contract that starts at $350,000 a year and will cap at $650,000 in the final year. She came to WVU from South Dakota and has a D-II national championship on her resume.

The three premier individual athletes of the year were women stars Ceili McCabe, a record-shattering All-American in track and cross country, rifle's Mary Tucker and soccer defender Jordan Brewster.

McCabe started the year on March 1 qualifying for the NCAA Indoor Track and Field Championships in Birmingham, Alabama, in the 3,000-meter run. She was tops in the Big 12 and No. 3 nationally with a season-best time of 8:52.52.

On March 12, the redshirt freshman earned All-American honors by finishing 8th, setting her on the way to being named this November as the Big 12's Women's Runner of the Year for the second straight time. Despite a disappointing 24th-place finish in the NCAA Cross Country finals, she won every other cross-country race in which she competed, including the Big 12 Championship and the NCAA Mid-Atlantic Championship.

In May, she won her second consecutive Big 12 3,000-meter steeplechase championship in 10:12.87, leading nine WVU women to all-conference performances in the meet.

A month later, she earned All-American honors in the steeplechase after placing third in 9:31.14.

She closed out the calendar year on Dec. 3, breaking her own WVU program record in the 3,000-meter run with a time of 8:50.44 at the Boston University Sharon Colyear-Danville season opener.

Tucker transferred to WVU in mid-May from Kentucky, where she led the Wildcats to the past two national championships.

A month after arriving, she won the gold medal in the junior women's air rifle competition and silver medal in the junior women's smallbore relay at the 2022 National Rifle Championships.

Then, shooting for WVU, on Nov. 18 she put on a dazzling record-breaking performance to lead the Mountaineers' No. 5 rifle team to a 4,751-4,687 victory over No. 11 North Carolina State. Tucker shot a 1,196 overall, including a 597 in smallbore and a 599 in air rifle.

The Sarasota, Florida, native set the NCAA record for aggregate score and tied the national record for smallbore score in the match. Her 599 in air rifle tied her season high. Tucker also set the program records for aggregate and smallbore score in the contest.

Brewster, a fifth-year senior, produced the most stunning moment of the year in Mountaineer athletics and capped an improbable late-season run to the Big 12 Tournament championship for the No. 4 seed by booting home a free kick from far out in the 93rd minute to beat top-seeded TCU, 1-0, in the final.

Named to the preseason All-Big 12 team, she delivered all season. She previewed the conference championship kick by beating No. 25 Samford on a free kick from just inside midfield with a minute left early in the year and then assisted on the game's only goal in a 1-0 victory over Kansas State in which she led the defense in holding the Wildcats to just one shot on goal in 90 minutes.

Brewster was named to the All-Big 12 first team, her fifth all-conference honor and third straight first-team distinction. She also earned a spot on the third team of the US Coaches All-American team, her third All-American distinction.

West Virginia University’s Hayhurst Family rifle coach Jon Hammond has announced that Maximus “Max� Duncan (Colorado Springs, Colo./The Vanguard School/UC Colorado Springs) has signed a national letter of intent and athletic grant-in-aid for the 2023-24 academic year.

“We are really happy Max has decided to come to WVU next fall,� Hammond said. “He has taken a more unorthodox route of getting onto a college rifle team, but I think his extra two years removed from high school and a year in college will really benefit him, his ability to adjust to being a college athlete and also his rifle experience.

“We have watched him improve for the last year or so and are excited to work with him once he gets to WVU and help him reach his potential with all the resources we can offer. He has the work ethic and drive that we look for in prospective team members, and we know he’ll give 100% as a Mountaineer.�

After graduating from the Vanguard School in Colorado Springs in 2021, Duncan began his academic career last year at the University of Colorado – Colorado Springs. He will enroll at WVU for the fall 2023 semester and have four years of eligibility remaining.

Duncan began shooting air rifle in January 2019, and smallbore in 2022.

This year, he won both the air rifle and smallbore titles at the 2022 Junior Men’s Colorado State Championships.

He also finished in eighth place in Junior Men’s Air Rifle at the 2022 USA Shooting Rifle Nationals.

Most recently, Duncan competed at USA Shooting’s 2022 Winter Air Gun Championships, where he took fourth place in the Junior Men’s Air Rifle Final.

Title IX became federal law on June 23, 1972.

Thus 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of that landmark higher education act that opened up a wide range of avenues for women, including intercollegiate athletics.

U.S. Sen. Burch Bayh, D- Ind., wrote the text of Title IX, which in 37 words helped create opportunities for women at educational institutions that had previously been closed to them because of their gender.

“No person in the United State shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participating in, be denied the benefit of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance,� Bayh wrote for Title IX, which was an update of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned various forms of discrimination when it came to employment, though not in education.

Title IX did not specifically mention sports, but it was quickly applied to athletic opportunities for females. Courts interpreted Title IX to mean that athletic scholarships and opportunities for female student-athletes had to be commensurate with those of men, or roughly relative to the ratio of male-to-female student enrollment at the college.

That included West Virginia University.

Dr. Leland Byrd was hired as WVU’s athletic director in 1972, and he was on the job barely a week when three female faculty members in the university’s Physical Education Department (Dr. Wincie Ann Carruth, Martha Thorn and Kittie Blakemore) approached him and requested that West Virginia’s athletic department, which didn’t have any varsity female sports teams at the time, begin sponsoring some.

Scraping together $10,000 (most of which went for travel and basic uniforms), Byrd started intercollegiate athletic programs in 1973 for women’s basketball (with Blakemore as coach), women’s tennis (with Thorn as coach) and women’s gymnastics (with Nanette Schnaible as coach the first year and Linda Burdette taking over the next). Swimming and volleyball fielded their first teams in 1974, followed by softball in 1976 and track/cross country in 1977. Since then, soccer (1996) and rowing (2010) have also been added to the Mountaineers’ list of varsity sports teams for women. Rifle, which has been a varsity program at WVU since 1951, is a coed sport that has had women on its squads since the ’60s.

Marilee Hohmann, a native of Fairmont, West Virginia, competed for the WVU rifle team in the 1961-62 season. She was the first female to participate in a varsity sport at West Virginia University. Appropriately, this year on the 50th anniversary of Title IX, which took effect more than a decade after her Mountaineer career, Hohmann was inducted into the WVU Sports Hall of Fame. She passed away in 1986 at the age of 43 as the result of cancer.

Hohmann’s path as a trailblazer wasn’t easy, but she set the stage for thousands of female student-athletes who have followed in her footsteps at WVU.

“If you look back at the growth of women’s sports, it’s been remarkable,� said former West Virginia director of athletic Shane Lyons, who obtained his bachelor’s degree from West Virginia University in 1987 and his master’s in 1988. “I enrolled at WVU roughly 10 years after Title IX, and I’ve seen the growth and popularity of women’s sports. The athleticism of some of those women is amazing, and it’s creating opportunities for women, just as it has for men.�

As Title IX is now applied, colleges are supposed to provide equal opportunities for male and female student-athletes, which isn’t always as easy as it sounds.

“There are challenges for us as institutions,� explained Lyons in regards to Title IX. “The biggest of those is the numbers you have in football; there isn’t really a female sport that has those types of numbers. Like a lot of schools, we have rowing, which carries 50 to 60 student-athletes on its roster, and that helps balance things out somewhat across the board.�

West Virginia’s athletic department sponsors 18 varsity sports — seven for men (baseball, basketball, football, golf, soccer, swimming & diving and wrestling) and 10 for women (basketball, cross country, gymnastics, rowing, soccer, swimming & diving, tennis, indoor track & field, outdoor track & field and volleyball) and one coed (rifle).

Lyons’ interest in women’s athletics predated his time at WVU.

“When I was growing up, female athletics was just starting to grow,� said Lyons, who is a native of Parkersburg, West Virginia. “My sister was one of the first females to play Little League baseball in our area. To see the growth and opportunities that have been provided since then by Title IX is something that should be celebrated.

“I have a daughter (Brooke, who is now a sophomore at WVU) who was involved in athletics in high school, and she could have played (volleyball) at a small college level if she wanted to follow that path. That option is great for females.�

West Virginia’s women’s sports programs have enjoyed significant success since they fielded their first teams in 1973. The basketball squads have earned 13 NCAA and five WNIT berths. Cross country has made 13 NCAA championship meet appearances, with five top 10 finishes. Gymnastics has gone to four NCAA/AIAW national championship meets, with a high finish of third in 1982. Soccer has made 22 NCAA Tournament appearances (2000-20 and ’22), with a runner-up finish in 2016. Track & field has featured four individual national champions and 96 All-Americans, including steeple chaser and cross country runner Ceili McCabe the last two years. Rifle has won 19 national team championships and has produced 28 individual NCAA champions and 468 All-Americans. Of those, women have accounted for 11 of WVU’s individual national rifle champions and 154 of its All-Americans.

Despite that success, Lyons hopes to see even better things in the future from the Mountaineer women’s intercollegiate athletic programs.

“I want female athletics to continue to grow and become even more popular. I don’t think by any means has it hit its ceiling,� stated Lyons, who served as WVU’s athletic director from 2015-22. “There are a lot of opportunities out there. Basketball is one we know about, but volleyball has really grown nationally among young females. I know that because my daughter was involved in that sport and went to many, many events all over. That sport has really grown. The same thing in women’s soccer, which has really grown in terms of participation and popularity.

“We have to continue our efforts to promote those sports and give those female athletes opportunities. I believe — and I think you can ask our female Olympic student-athletes and they’ll agree — that they are all treated fairly at WVU in terms of meals, transportation, access to coaches and training, uniforms and equipment and everything. We made a big push for the Academic Training Center (which opened in the fall of 2021) because it did serve our Olympic sports, and a majority of those are female sports. It was important to give them a facility that helps them develop and a place they can be proud of. It was very important.�

From Marilee Hohman in 1961 through WVU’s first female intercollegiate teams in 1973 to the present day, athletic opportunities for women have grown significantly at West Virginia University.

West Virginia's upset win in the final football game of 2022 left our panel with some good feelings, even though only one member selected the Mountaineers.

That was Chad, who parlayed that pick into a two-position jump and a fifth-place finish in the season standings.

Chris, the all-time leader in season championships, added another trophy to his shelf with an 8-4 record, while Greg finished one game back at 7-5. Somehow, the rest of the panel completed the year with identical 6-6 records, with that tie broken by point differentials.

It's onward to 2023 now, with both our group and WVU looking to improve on what was not the most stellar of 2022 campaigns.

Chris RichardsonLast Game: L Record: 8-4 Point Differential: 275Greg HunterLast Game: L Record: 7-5 Point Differential: 260 Jeff CobbLast Game: L Record: 6-6 Point Differential: 249 Michael MinnichLast Game: L Record: 6-6 Point Differential: 276 Chad EversonLast Game: L Record: 6-6 Point Differential: 283 Brian McCrackenLast Game: L Record: 6-6 Point Differential: 297 Bill GleasonLast Game: W Record: 6-6 Point Differential: 333