Lauren Kirschman, West Virginia News

KEVIN NOREEN HELPING YOUNG MOUNTAINEER TEAMMATES LEARN THEIR WAY

By Lauren Kirschman

Kevin Noreen is the lone player on his summer league team that played a game for the West Virginia Mountaineers last season.

The remainder of the squad is made up of freshmen and two transfers—Aaric Murray (La Salle) and Juwan Staten (Dayton).

The team played its first game together on Monday.

The players all met for the first time on Saturday.

“We’re all on the same team in this league and we’re just getting to know each other really well,” Noreen said. “I think in these two games we’ve already gelled and have a good camaraderie going on so far.

Although the Mountaineer roster isn’t completely lacking experience with seniors Darryl Bryant and Kevin Jones as well as junior Deniz Killcli, none of those players are on Noreen’s team this summer.

That means that Noreen, a redshirt freshman who played in only seven games last season after undergoing knee surgery, is being thrust into a leadership role.

“Even though I only played in seven games last year, I just feel like I went through practices—I know what that’s like, I know how demanding that is,” Noreen said.

He said he wants to guide the younger players the way the veteran players on the roster guided him.

“The older guys last year shared with me how to get through it, what to do, how to just deal with the intensity of it,” he said. “I think I can share some of that with the new guys.”

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On Monday, Noreen’s Pro-Am team dropped its first game dropped its first game of the summer 58-54 after falling behind by 24 points in the first half. But toward the end of the half, the group seemed to find its way, putting together a 14-2 run.

In the team’s second game on Tuesday, Noreen and his team jumped out to an early lead, but fell 61-60 in overtime. Noreen said that even with the loss, he noticed some promising development in game two.

“Our team works better when we’re sharing the ball,” he said on Wednesday. “We shared the ball a little more this game than last. I felt like we could have won it but it got away from us in the end.”

He said the biggest challenge with a young team is that the players aren’t used to performing at the collegiate level.

“You just got guys that are at the high school level that don’t really know what the college level is like, just the speed of the game,” he said. “It’s just something you have to learn through practice and through playing. We’ll get there.”

Noreen said he’s been running two-man workouts with incoming freshman Gary Browne and the rest of the point guards in order to work on the pick and pop and pick and rolls.

“We have a lot of that in our offense,” he said.

Personally, the 6-foot-10, 235 pound forward said he’s concentrating on shooting in order to extend his range and hit shots on a consistent basis.

“That was the problem we had last year,” he said. “We couldn’t knock down shots consistently and our percentage suffered.”