Joe Mazzulla, the guy who’s been readying himself for a career in coaching, could have started down his preferred path as soon as his career as a WVU player ended. An otherwise innocent interview after the NCAA Tournament game against Clemson was seen by the head coach at Division II Nova Southeastern College and that coach needed to see no more.

After Gary Tuell made a few calls to check out Mazzulla and gauge his interest, Mazzulla was offered an assistant coach position in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.

So that was that. A long road reached a sudden end.

Then again, the mind and heart sometimes conspire to take a detour.

Mazzulla has worked at becoming a coach. He got his undergraduate degree early and made sure he split his bachelor’s in multidisciplinary studies into Spanish, business and sports exercise psychology because — and this is the truth according to Joe — “I’m going to coach and recruit guys from Spain and deal with people as mentally unstable as I am.” He finished his master’s work last month and will receive his parchment for athletic coaching education this weekend.

He’s saved almost everything he was given to study as a player, be it playbooks or scouting reports from John Beilein and Bob Huggins. When he played on a college all-star team in the Bahamas in the summer of 2008, he schooled St. Bonaventure Coach Mark Schmidt, Syracuse assistant Mike Hopkins and then-Vermont assistant Matt Hahn on the 1-3-1.

When he was hurt the following season, he did the same for Huggins … and the 1-3-1 became a pretty big reason why WVU made it to the Final Four a season later.

Of course, Mazzulla was a big reason, too, and his game against Kentucky and the regional MOP award won’t soon be forgotten, least of all by Mazzulla. See, that was the start of his return to playing at a pretty high level and he finished the second half of this past season playing better than he’d ever played at WVU.

He couldn’t, in good faith, say that would be the last he’d ever play. So the sure thing coach is going to put that on the shelf for a while. No matter what he did to position himself to be a quality coach, he feels he did more to become a quality player again.

“I think I’ve put myself in a good enough position as far as the relationships I’ve built and my master’s degree that I can take a risk and do what I love to do, what I’ve done my whole life, and that’s play basketball,” he said. “I’ve always been a competitor and I’d rather have someone drag me off the floor than just step away.”

There is risk involved. The shoulder will never be as it once was and there’s a certain danger involved in every game he plays. If that were a deterrent, though, Mazzulla wouldn’t have pushed as hard as he did to get back at WVU.

It won’t stop him now.

“People say, ‘What if you blow your shoulder out?'” he said. “I’d consider blowing it out to be trying instead of blowing it out 10 years from now mowing the lawn.”