How Long Will the Coaching Search Take? Baker Details Tricky Timeline
Wren Bakers has another coaching search to operate, technically the fourth since he was appointed as the the AD at West Virginia University.
This search, though, may be his most important one yet. Can he find the right coach to help restore a program with a rich history? Time will tell and time is something Baker is well aware of.
He doesn't want to rush this search and get the wrong man for the job, but he also understands that in today's era, you have to make that transition as quickly as humanly possible to keep guys from entering the portal but more importantly, so the new coach can use the portal to piece together his group for his first season on the job.
"Basketball is a harder one to pin down because you have the way the postseason in structured," Baker said in reference to a timeline for a hire. "And once Selection Sunday comes out, they have to prepare for three opponents in a week probably that they haven't ever seen before. So getting somebody to unplug from that and to plug into your search is kind of difficult and I'm not sure that you would want them to do that. But my hope would be that we can go quickly. We've certainly had enough time to study profiles and all of that, so I think we're prepared to move pretty quickly but some of that is incumbent upon the schedule of the candidates. But certainly I would hope that we could get a search completed by the Final Four, if not really close to there."
As far as competing against other schools for prospective candidates, Baker isn't investing too much time into that. Yeah, he'll keep tabs on what others are doing but he's not going to stress over it. He knows how attractive this job is and talked about it during his press conference yesterday afternoon.
"This is a GREAT basketball job. I mean, a really, really strong program. Tremendous tradition. We've done it with multiple coaches over the years. Great facilities. Certainly a top ten, maybe a top five basketball practice facility. The Coliseum is an awesome venue. In KenPom, we're number two in the country in home court advantage and it was last year too. That's something that's really important. Fan passion feeds into that. This is a great job."
