Rosemary Kosiorek, pictured during her playing days at WVU.

MORGANTOWN — As the story goes, when Rosemary Kosiorek was fielding college basketball offers, there were two things that were sort of at the top of her list.

The first was the opportunity to play.

“My thoughts always were, and this is something I always told my kids when they were growing up, is if you put in all the work and you have a passion for it, then that means you want to play,” the former WVU women’s basketball star said. “I didn’t want to go somewhere that was going to ask me to sit on the bench for a couple of years. I wanted to go where I could keep playing right away.”

To that degree, West Virginia checked off the box. The Mountaineers’ program was just 15 years old when Kosiorek – now Rosemary Meyer – first walked onto WVU’s campus in the fall of 1988. While the first NCAA women’s basketball tournament wasn’t until 1982, WVU had yet to play in one.

That was about to change, and by the time Meyer wrapped up her All-American career with the Mountaineers, she helped the program make history that took 34 years to repeat.

During the 1991-92 season, Meyer’s senior year, the Mountaineers finished 26-4, rose as high as No. 11 in the national rankings, and WVU hosted the opening rounds of the NCAA tournament.

WVU earned a first-round bye – there were only 48 teams in the field then – and defeated Clemson, 73-72, inside the Hope Coliseum in front of 8,268 fans to advance to the Sweet 16 in Charlottesville, Va.

“Having that one game in Morgantown, I’ll never forget how that felt and what it meant to all of us,” Meyer said. “What made it so awesome is no one thought it could happen. I mean, no way was the NCAA tournament going to come to little West Virginia.”

More than three decades later, WVU head coach Mark Kellogg has his Mountaineers (27-6) at No. 11 in the nation, a No. 4 seed nationally in the NCAAs and set to host Miami (Ohio) on Saturday in Morgantown in the tournament’s first round.

It will be the first time the NCAA women’s tournament has returned to Morgantown since Meyer was the standout.

“I think it’s absolutely phenomenal,” said Meyer, who lives in Baltimore and is a partner at KPMG LLP., one of the nation’s largest accounting organizations. “They really have a great team. I’ve watched them on TV many times. I love the style of basketball they play.

“I think it’s awesome the NCAAs are back in Morgantown. I know the rules have changed back and forth over the years on where the women’s games were played, but it’s been a long time coming.”

And what was the second thing Meyer was looking for in a college? She also had offers from schools such as Providence, La Salle and Temple, but none of those schools had Major Harris playing quarterback for their football team.

“I wanted a big campus, a football school,” Meyer said. “When I first arrived at WVU, it was such an exciting time, because Major Harris was leading the team to the Fiesta Bowl and the national championship game.

“I went to every home game or almost all of them. Yeah, now that I think about it, Major Harris probably played a part in me wanting to go to WVU.”

The building of a program

It had been just a few years prior to Meyer’s arrival in Morgantown when the WVU women’s program got its first jolt of national exposure that came with former standout Georgeann Wells becoming the first woman to dunk a basketball in 1984.

Yet the program had only two 20-win seasons to speak of and competing against the likes of Rutgers, Penn State and George Washington in the Atlantic 10 wasn’t getting any easier.

When Meyer signed with the Mountaineers out of Mercy (Baltimore, Md.) High School, she was part of a signing class that also included Huntington’s Donna Abbott and they joined a roster that included seniors Jenny Hillen and Judy Eaton.

WVU went 24-8, won the Atlantic 10 tournament, and upset 19th-ranked Western Kentucky in the first round of the NCAA tournament, the program’s first-ever trip to the NCAAs. Meyer started 17 games as a freshman and averaged 11.4 points per game, the beginning of what became a Hall-of-Fame career.

“That first year, it opened up my eyes to what could happen,” Meyer said. “We had great senior leaders with Jenny and Judy. We proved that we could go out and compete.”

As Meyer’s game developed as a sophomore and junior, WVU couldn’t get over the hump. The Mountaineers lost against No. 23 St. Joseph’s in the Atlantic 10 semifinals in 1990 and then to No. 1-ranked Penn State in the conference semifinals a year later.

Then came that 1991-92 season. Penn State had just moved to the Big Ten and the Atlantic 10 was up for grabs.

“I think we all kind of saw what was coming,” Meyer said. “We had a good core group of players who were dedicated and we were all very close. We had great chemistry. It all just came together that season.”

The Mountaineers began that season with a loaded schedule, playing Florida, Virginia, Indiana and Western Kentucky among its first five games. They were 4-2 after winning the home opener against Pitt in front of 451 fans.

The win over Pitt was the first of what amounted to a 22-game winning streak that led to WVU moving into its first-ever ranking in the AP Top 25.

By the time WVU played its final home game of the regular season, an 88-65 win over Rutgers, crowds at the Coliseum had gone from 451 to more than 3,000.

“At the time, I don’t really know that any of us thought we were building something,” Meyer said. “We never talked about making history or anything like that. We just noticed that more people were coming to the games and we loved that. It helped to motivate us to do even better.”

First-time host

Meyer averaged 24.3 points per game as a senior. It’s still the highest single-season average in WVU’s women’s history. She was named the Atlantic 10 Player of the Year and a second-team All-American.

And as far as the Mountaineers hosting a NCAA regional that season, Meyer thought the team had blown that opportunity days before.

“We lost to Duquesne in the first round of the Atlantic 10 tournament,” Meyer said. “That might have been the most miserable I ever was as a basketball player. We should have never lost that game. We overlooked them, and I remember thinking at the time that we blew it.”

WVU dropped from No. 11 to No. 14 in the national rankings following the upset loss, but the NCAA still chose Morgantown as a host site.

A then-record crowd of 8,268 showed up in the Coliseum for that 73-72 win over Clemson, in which Morgantown’s own Jodie Runner came off the bench to hit a 14-footer with 11 seconds remaining to win the game.

An expected sellout crowd of 14,000 is expected on hand for WVU’s first-round game on Saturday, marking the program’s second sellout in history.

“To me, that speaks to how much the game has grown,” Meyer said. “The crowd for our game was awesome. I know the players will feed off the atmosphere.

“It’s a little disappointing it took as long as it did for the school to host again, but it’s going to be something those players will never forget.”