MORGANTOWN — Honor Huff made both free throws to put West Virginia men’s basketball up 89-82 with 37 seconds left in overtime. The Mountaineers were eyeing down the Crown Tournament Championship, with Oklahoma on its heels. The Sooners shot a 3-pointer, but missed, allowing for WVU to close it out and take the tournament.

Athletic Director Wren Baker was in Las Vegas to witness Ross Hodge and his team win the postseason tournament. Baker was obviously excited, but he was proud of the team before even heading to Las Vegas.

“I was pleased even before the Crown event,” Baker said. “But I think you go out there in the Crown event, you get a really good Stanford team that could have very easily been an NCAA tournament team with a generational talent there at guard. Creighton, who’s been really, really good and consistent over the last two decades, and Oklahoma, who’s as talented offensively as anybody that you’ll face, and who’s very physical and athletic. You win those three games, and I thought the way it ended was very, very good.”

Baker hired Hodge last spring after Darian DeVries took the Indiana head coaching job. Hodge came over from North Texas, which was where Baker was once the AD.

Hodge had a lot of work to do, starting with completely rebuilding a roster through the portal since most of WVU’s 2024-25 squad left. Hodge built a team with a middle-of-the-road Big 12 budget, around 10-12, according to Baker, and still managed to finish seventh, winning almost 20 regular-season games. With the Crown wins, Hodge finished his first season as head coach with a 21-14 and a .500 record in the Big 12.

“I think overall return on investment, given all the parameters that they had to deal with, our basketball staff did a really, really good job with that team,” Baker said. “I’m particularly pleased just from a culture standpoint.”

Seeing Hodge succeed was a relief because, as Baker called it, hiring a new head coach, especially for men’s basketball, is like an athletic director’s Super Bowl. There’s some excitement, but also a lot of stress. Especially hiring a coach at WVU that has so much history, and impact on the rest of the state with no professional teams.

With the pressure, hiring a head coach is draining.

“I’ve never not lost five or six pounds during a coaching search, because I just get so immersed in it,” Baker said. “So physically, emotionally, mentally, it’s exhausting. But, it’s also thrilling and exciting when you’re in it. It’s probably how I wasn’t a great athlete, probably how a great athlete feels in a big-time game. In the moment, their laser focused. Then you get to the end, and you’re just spent.”

Knowing how much impact the head coach has on a program, Baker and WVU have an in-depth hiring process for every head coach, no matter the sport.

Baker has had to hire a lot of head coaches since taking the job in 2022, including football, men’s and women’s basketball and baseball.

Once there is a head coaching opening, Baker assembles a search committee and assigns each person two or three conferences. Baker and the committee comb through every conference, every head coach and the top assistant coaches. He notes where they’ve been, the team’s record, the recruiting rankings, and the team’s academic success. Baker calls his contacts who have been around the head coach, trying to figure out if they are a good person or if they’re out partying. This takes two days.

After two days, Baker and the committee regroup and cross-match their information. Sometimes Baker will have someone not on the committee’s radar, and the committee might not have someone that Baker noted down. This process gets it down to 40 to 50 candidates. That 40 to 50 gets narrowed down to 15 to 20, and then down to eight to 10.

“Sometimes we’ll go 10 or 12 hours in a row, and our staff will complain because I’m not great about eating during those times,” Baker said. “They say, I starve them to death. But, we’ll go until the work is done.”

From the eight to 10, Baker and the committee look at even more information that includes how the person acts after a win, a loss, game tape and even more analytics, including predicted analytics. The committee will rank its candidates before Baker does because he doesn’t want to influence the rankings. That’s when the in-person and Zoom interviews start.

The biggest decider is if the person is a fit for the state of West Virginia.

“That one’s a little harder sometimes to put your finger on it,” Baker said. “So that’s kind of the process that we go through.”

This extensive process is what Baker used to hire Hodge.

After losing some questionable games during the season, losing in its first game of the Big 12 Tournament and missing out on the NCAA Tournament, there were frustrations about Hodge and questions surrounding if he was the right hire for WVU. Some concluded Hodge was only hired because of his connections to Baker at North Texas.

Baker and WVU didn’t treat Hodge any differently than any other candidate.

“Coach Hodge got this job because he was the best candidate for the job when we went through the process,” Baker said. “Anybody who might have other opinions didn’t go through the process. They don’t understand. I’m not saying that our process is perfect. But in 20 years, I’ve done almost 30 head coaching searches, and I think they’re averaging close to 70% winning percentage. It’s a process that’s been good to me and that I believe in, and we’re going to follow… I think our fans, our student athletes, our university, community, the state deserve a very thorough and fair process. That’s ultimately how coach Hodge became the head coach here.”

When Baker is hiring a head coach, emotions are out of the conversation. Baker is a Dallas Cowboys fan, and when he’s watching games, he can fire the head coach as many times as he wants on his couch. But, at WVU, there’s a lot more responsibility and every decision has a lot more weight.

“In this job, I’m paid to be deliberate, thoughtful and analytical,” Baker said. “It’s my job. I don’t get to ride the emotional waves that everybody else gets to do.”

Instead, the emotions get spilled seeing the happy faces of Hodge and the players with the confetti raining down on them in Las Vegas.

It wasn’t perfect. Hodge had his ups and downs in his first season as head coach. But, there were some big wins, and seeing Hodge take the Crown was the cherry on top. There’s a lot of momentum riding into next season.

Baker knows winning the Crown isn’t the end goal. It’s winning the Big 12 and making it back in the NCAA Tournament, which WVU hasn’t done since Bob Huggins was the head coach in 2023.

After Year 1, and the situation Hodge was put in, Baker is pleased and excited for Year 2, highlighted by 5-star freshman Miles Sadler.

“Would we have liked to have been in the NCAA tournament, like, yeah?” Baker said. “I think one of the first things coach Hodge told the guys was how proud he was of them and how he hopes that we never have to play in the Crown again. It was a great experience. But that’s not the ultimate goal. I think everybody would admit that, but I was really, really proud of the job that those guys did.”