Friday Feedback
June 5, 2015 by Mike CasazzaWelcome to the Friday Feedback and, boy, I sure wish the NBA Finals started last night and we could talk about the series and how this might be really exciting if fate treats Cleveland kindly! Can’t wait!
Let’s soldier on and consider another WVU number to treasure. The post yesterday was intended for football, and there’s a good debate we’ll get into in a moment. If you extend it to basketball, it has to be 44, right? Baseball is probably 5. Wrestling is 184. It’s a fun exercise for all the sports and even for the school. Wouldn’t 44 be the number for the school? Jerry West, Rod Thorn, Jim Braxton, Tim Agee. Not bad.
But maybe years from now we’re thinking differently. How about 88? James Jett (for a year) and Reggie Rembert (and Cody Clay?), plus the ’88 team played for a national title.
And also Kadeisha Buchanan, the starting center back for the Canadian women’s national team. She’s pretty special, if you aren’t familiar. Allow Kicking Nikki to explain.
“I’m a pretty humble person and a pretty humble coach,” Izzo-Brown said, “but I will go on the record and say she will be the best center back to ever play the game.”
Izzo-Brown is adamant about this, and she’s consistent in supporting her point.
“As incredibly gifted as Kevin White is and some of the guys who come through the football program here, she is just as athletic, just as incredibly talented as Tavon (Austin) and Geno (Smith) and all the other greats we’ve had at this level,” she said.
Buchanan, who scored on a header that got past United States goalie Hope Solo in a 1-1 draw in May 2014, is a star up north. Canada decided to feature Buchanan, the 2013 under-20 national player of the year, on a commemorative World Cup Stamp with forward Christine Sinclair, the nation’s most experienced and most accomplished player.
“I don’t know anybody on a stamp that’s alive, and it doesn’t even phase her,” Izzo-Brown said of Buchanan, who has two goals and 35 appearances (32 starts) with the national team.
A stamp! It’s Logoesque. If you’ve never seen her play, you should and can change that. The World Cup starts with Canada v. China at 6 p.m. tomorrow on Fox Sports 1. She also plays a pretty critical and visible role for the Mountaineers. She’s the starter in the middle of the back for WVU, and she takes the ball off the back line and up the pitch, which is something else if you don’t appreciate me mentioning that. Right backs will push the ball up the rail to help an attack. The center rarely does that unless the center is special. That’s Buchanan, and she’s 19.
Her WVU and Team Canada teammate, Ashley Lawrence, isn’t a slouch, either, and she’s made great strides in two years to solidify a position on the pitch and on the roster.
“With Canada, we went back and forth some, and they thought maybe she was better off at a different position,” Izzo-Brown said. “Not to say I was right, but I truly believed Ashley was a midfielder by trade and I stuck by that. These past two seasons, she’s had a great opportunity to show Canada she can be an impact on the field for them, so I’m real happy she’s been able to showcase her trade and her talent and also get better as a player.”
Of all the pipelines we discuss here, the path women’s soccer has blazed from Canada to Morgantown is perhaps most impressive. (Aside: Do we add Lackawanna now? I saw Wesco on my visit and mistakenly thought he was a tackle. He’s a brute. More Clay and less Jace Amaro, but he was a first-team all-state high school basketball star at Musselman, so he can move some.)
Onto the Feedback. As always, comments appear as posted. In other words, play the part.
Mack said:
I am about as big a WVU fan as anyone (though I’m in my 30’s, so I don’t have the history that some have)… and I had never once heard of the name Ira Errett Rogers until it was noted in the ESPN College Football Encyclopedia as the best WVU football player ever. Not long after that his number was retired at Mountaineer Field.
I’m not a big fan of retiring numbers. I think that all of the greats should be recognized in different form and fashion… but there’s so many ways to do it that I think retiring numbers is just lazy and doesn’t really do anything for anyone. Same with building stupid statues of people.
I love that the entrance video for the football team shows all of the great historical plays (the only criticism is that it goes way too fast through all of them and makes it impossible to comprehend them if they’re new to you). I like that WVU brings back the greats from game to game. I randomly passed Major Harris in the Blue Lot one day and got a picture with him. I like all of this stuff because it allows younger fans to enjoy what made those guys great. Just painting a number on a wall doesn’t really do anything for those guys.
As we know, it’s pretty difficult to memorialize a number here. I think it ought to be hard to permanently shelf a number, but I don’t have a problem with a ceremony in which a jersey is retired — and by “retired” I mean framed and handed to a former player for prosperity posterity. That seems reasonable and it’s not done in perpetuity. Statues are cool, but let’s not get all Yankees with it and give everyone a monument.
Mack said:
One last note on the above, I haven’t gone to a WVU basketball game in the Coliseum in a decade, but wouldn’t it be good for some Jerry West WVU footage to be shown from time to time? How many people on this here blog have truly ever seen a minute of Jerry West playing for WVU?
They run some in the pregame. It’s much the same as your beloved football montage.
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