ROSS HODGE

MORGANTOWN — The perfect compliment that could be made to a basketball team coached by Ross Hodge would be more about grit than glamour, toughness over style points.

Hodge was officially introduced Thursday morning as West Virginia’s 24th men’s basketball coach, something the 44-year old coach called “a blessing” and “an opportunity that I certainly don’t take lightly.”

He will now take that opportunity and attempt to build the Mountaineers into one of the premiere defensive-style programs in the Big 12, a spot currently dominated by second-ranked Houston, which finds itself in the Final Four for the second time in the last five seasons.

“You can look it up, the teams that have had the best defense; when Kansas was winning the Big 12, it was the best defensive team,” Hodge said. “Houston has won the Big 12 recently, they’ve been the best defensive team in the league.”

Hodge’s strategy will follow along those same lines — “I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t want to play like Houston, they’re in the Final Four,” he said. — but the story behind his defensive mentality is one with many motivations.

That story begins with his mother Linda, a woman who supported her family by working three jobs.

“My mom, she’s the toughest person I know,” Hodge said.

She would wake up at 4:30 in the morning to begin her shift as a school bus driver. She also worked as a teacher’s aide at the local high school.

“When that was over, she worked at JCPenney,” Hodge said while pointing to his mother in the front row. “She would have stretches of going 20, 21 days in a row without ever taking a day off. If you watch our team play and say that’s a tough team, well, that’s a tough woman right there.”

Hodge’s own college basketball career at Paris (Texas) Junior College and then Texas A&M-Commerce was not one built around athleticism and grace in motion.

“I wasn’t a great player. I was OK,” he said. “But there was a certain amount of grit and toughness, competitiveness and fight that I had to show up with every single day.”

Hodge’s tenure at WVU begins by replacing Darian DeVries, a coach who brought his own sense of toughness and defense-first style to the Mountaineers.

The issue was DeVries lasted just one season with the Mountaineers, as he became the head coach at Indiana on March 18.

Hodge, who spent the last two seasons as the head coach at North Texas, but was an assistant at that school for seven seasons before becoming the head coach, is signed at WVU for five years.

His contract details have yet to be released, but it didn’t take long during Thursday’s press conference for Hodge to be asked about his commitment level to the Mountaineers.

“This move was not an easy move for me, I’ll be perfectly honest,” Hodge said. “We talked a lot as a family. We shed a lot of tears. We had deep and meaningful relationships in Denton (Texas). That’s something that was very important to us. There were probably only a handful of situations that we would have even considered.

“Personally, I had several opportunities to leave when I was an assistant at North Texas for what some people might say was a bigger and better opportunity; bigger brands, higher levels, more money. Ultimately, that’s not necessarily what I’m interested in. I’m interested in people and being at a place we can call home.”

He will take over a program that has three scholarship players on the current roster. All of them sat out as redshirts last season.

Essentially, he is starting from scratch with the Mountaineers.

That fact doesn’t scare him a bit.

“That’s kind of how it is every year now in college athletics,” Hodge said. “You’re very fortunate if you’re able to keep a couple of core players or a couple of rotation players.

“There are a lot of good players still in the portal. We have an incredible brand, a national brand. We’re in one of the best conferences in the country. There is a lot to sell. We do have the resources in this market to do what we need to do. We just have to make quality decisions.”