You’ll remember back in August when WVU’s football players more or less threw their hands up and said they were done practicing on the natural grass surface back behind the dysfunctional indoor practice facility.

Maybe it wasn’t that dramatic.

But practice conditions, and even the mere attempt to discuss them, can be divisive at WVU. Dana Holgorsen doesn’t want to practice at the stadium because it diminishes the novelty he believes should be reserved for game day. The indoor facility is sub-optimal because it doesn’t have a regulation field and isn’t wide enough to allow for drills when one group isn’t butting up against another.

The outdoor facility is all right, actually. It has the most available space. You can get speakers out there. Taping practice isn’t hard. It works. But the grass is a mess. It can survive a few days before it goes bad, and, for whatever reason, moisture and/or draining is an issue up there.

That issue was impossible to ignore after one day last summer.

During preseason camp, the Mountaineers spent a small part of one full-contact practice on the natural grass next to the indoor practice facility. They were there for less than half an hour Aug. 4 before coach Dana Holgorsen moved his team down the hill and back inside Mountaineer Field.

And as odd as that seemed, it was a huge relief for the players.

“We were pulling large chunks of grass out when we were trying to cut or push off,” one player told the Charleston Daly Mail. “You shouldn’t be slipping like that in practice. You don’t want a guy to injure himself because of the field and not because something else happened that you can’t control.”

The Daily Mail talked to several players about what happened that day, and WVU was indeed worried about injuries. During the Oklahoma drill, with the media watching, several players slipped and fell during the contact period. In one sequence, offensive lineman Stone Underwood was working against nose guard Brandon Jackson. The grass gave way beneath them and they collapsed. Underwood injured his shoulder and Jackson tweaked a hamstring. Both missed subsequent practices.

What multiple players remembered most was what happened to Dustin Garrison, a running back who tore an ACL on grass at an Orange Bowl practice in December 2011 and who ended up redshirting last season with a hamstring problem. Garrison angled out of the backfield and caught a swing pass. He planted so he could run up the field, but a foot got stuck in the grass. Garrison broke stride and pulled his foot from turf and avoided danger.

The Mountaineers were soon on the move from one field to another.

“It was a mess,” a player said. “It was slippery. Every time a guy made a cut, the grass came loose under his feet.”

The team never went back there again. The school is taking that a bit more seriously now.

Among a list of scheduled improvements in the athletic department — men’s basketball and golf are high on the list, too — is $a 1.8 million project to redesign that space. It should be done by spring football, and that’s a necessity because the turf will be replaced and the crown will be removed at Mountaineer Field in the offseason. (Here’s the cross-your-fingers moment: If they screw up this project and if it’s inexplicably not done in time for spring practice, there’s basically nowhere to practice on campus, unless they want to use the intramural fields … and they’re kind of nice.)

What can actually happen is somewhat limited. There are hillsides to work with and that land really can’t go anywhere. There have been discussions about trying to create some extra space and using retaining walls to make it happen, but realistically it can’t be much. Again, though, space isn’t the big problem. The surface was, and that’s being addressed.

“It’s going to be pretty much the same space up there with a turf and grass combination,” Borman said. “We want to try to get grass up there in some spot, maybe half the field, so we make sure that when we do play a game on a natural surface we have a place to practice.”