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.â€
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.
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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.
