What a wild few years it has been for WVU’s Vice President and Director of Athletics, Wren Baker.
Now approaching four years on the job, Baker is finally seeing something that hasn’t always been easy to find around WVU Athletics — stability. Read more: WVU is changing the definition of snakebitten.
Thursday’s announcement that WVU has extended baseball coach Steve Sabins, volleyball coach Jen Greeny and women’s basketball coach Mark Kellogg is about more than rewarding three coaches for doing good work.
Related: Wren Baker announces contract extensions for three WVU head coaches
To me, it sends another message.
West Virginia wants to be the endgame. Not the place where you come, win, and wait for somebody else to poach you.
Mountaineer fans certainly know that story.
Coaching carousels
You don’t have to go back very far in WVU history to remember John Beilein building West Virginia hoops into a national contender before leaving for Michigan in 2007. Then, just months later, Rich Rodriguez had football on the doorstep of playing for a national championship.
Michigan took him, too. Same school. Same year.
West Virginia fans have almost been conditioned to wonder when the other shoe is going to drop. And Baker certainly hasn’t been immune from it. He took over in December 2022 and has seen one transition after another.
Bob Huggins was gone within months. Dawn Plitzuweit left after one season. Randy Mazey announced his retirement. Baker eventually moved on from Neal Brown. He hired Darian DeVries, watched him win 19 games, and then saw him leave for Indiana after one season.
And all of this was happening while the entire landscape of college athletics was changing dramatically. The transfer portal changed roster building. NIL changed recruiting. Revenue sharing has pushed college athletics even closer to a professional sports model.
It’s a business now more than ever.
And if you are going to ask players to believe West Virginia is a destination, it helps when the people recruiting them believe the same thing.
Once bitten, twice shy
Some might say WVU has been a little snake-bitten over the years. Apparently, Wren Baker took that literally.
Baker revealed on “3 Guys Before the Game” this week that he recently had an encounter with a copperhead that ended with the snake biting him.
Thankfully, Baker is fine.
And maybe it’s time for the department to change the definition of snakebitten.
Because look around.
Sabins just led WVU baseball to the greatest season in the program’s 135-year history. The Mountaineers made their first College World Series and were one of the final four teams remaining in Omaha.
Kellogg has turned women’s basketball into a consistent NCAA Tournament program and just delivered a Big 12 Tournament championship.
Greeny is building a volleyball program the school clearly believes can enjoy sustained success.
Instead of waiting for another school to recognize what West Virginia has, Baker is trying to make sure those coaches know what they have here. That’s important. It doesn’t mean coaches will never leave. That’s not realistic anymore – if it ever was. Contracts get broken. Buyouts get paid. Opportunities come along.
Ultimate destination
But there is a difference between hoping people stay and building an athletic department where they want to stay.
That’s the next step for West Virginia. And, of course, the biggest piece of all of this remains football.
We’re hoping the same stability eventually comes there under Rodriguez, who has returned to the place he once left and is now trying to build it again in a completely different era of college football.
There is still plenty of work ahead.
But for the first time in much of Baker’s tenure, it feels like we’re spending less time talking about who left and more time talking about who is staying.
That’s progress.
After nearly four years of putting out fires, Wren Baker is finally getting the chance to build the athletic department he envisioned when he came to Morgantown.
And perhaps West Virginia isn’t quite as snakebitten as we thought.
The athletic director?
That’s another story.
