Nichols Seeks Happy Homecoming at WVU

Saturday, January 30

Morgantown, WV

2 PM

Florida Gators

West Virginia

Darris Nichols already has enjoyed home and neutral-site wins over Bob Huggins, his former coach at West Virginia, but Saturday Nichols be back at his alma mater when the Gators face the Mountaineers in Morgantown, W.Va.

Nichols Seeks Happy Homecoming at WVU

Friday, January 29, 2021 | Men's Basketball, Chris Harry

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Everyone in the West Virginia basketball program understood that things were going to be different. Very different. It was spring of 2007 and the Mountaineers had undergone a seismic coaching change.

Bob Huggins had returned to his alma mater.

Huggins' reputation, one of a winner and taskmaster, proceeded him, of course, so the initial tough talk — "You want to be here, you better be good at something" — was as much a promise that players would be held to a certain standard as it was a warning of what was ahead.

One of those players was senior point guard Darris Nichols, now an assistant coach for the Florida Gators (9-4), who face the No. 11 Mountaineers (11-4) in Saturday's SEC/Big 12 Challenge at WVU Coliseum. Nichols remembers the first Huggins practice. Foam rollers were fairly new to pre-hab routines at the time and West Virginia's strength coach had the team rolling their legs when Huggins entered the practice gym and ordered the first drill.

Full-court one-one. Drill ends when each player gets two stops.

Needless to say, the Mountaineers, to a man, were quickly gassed — this was the offseason, by the way — and were hearing about it from Huggins. One of the players spoke up.

"Coach, we're not loose."

"Yeah," Huggins shot back. " That's because you were rolling around on that foam for 15 minutes"

If that didn't get the point across, the treadmill situated permanently next to the the court did. It ran non-stop during practice at 16 miles per hour. A turnover, missed box-outs, bad shot or the like earned a player a 22-second sprint. Run it, then jump right back into the full-contact mix.

"It didn't take long to figure out things were about to get real," Nichols said.

WVU point guard Darris Nichols (14) in old-time Big East action, circa 2008.

Here's how real things got: Not only was Nichols' senior season a memorable one, but that one year under Huggins, combined the three prior under John Beilein, gave Nichols quite the base for his eventual foray into coaching and a career that put his name on a list of promising assistants ready to take the next step. Look for Nichols' name to be tied to some Division-I openings this offseason. For now, though, he's laser-focused on the Gators' and a date against the Mountaineers that figures to be — not just nostalgic — as tough as any during this crazy, COVID-cut up 2020-21 season.

"A lot of the people that are going to be on the other side of the court, on the other bench, are people who have helped me get to where I am today," Nichols said. "To me, that is a homecoming."

[Read senior writer Chris Harry's "Pregame Stuff" setup here]

WVU Coliseum will allow fans inside for the first time this season, but it won't be raucous like during Nichols' days as a four-year letter-winner and two-year starter who fell seven points shy of 1,000 for his career and played a leading role in the Mountaineers' basketball revival. As a freshman, Nichols came off the bench on WVU's first NCAA Tournament team in seven years, with the Mountaineers falling to Louisville in the West Region final. He was a key reserve as a sophomore. That season ended in the Sweet 16 against Texas and a 3-pointer at the buzzer.

Nichols started his last two years — the last 73 games of his career — and made them count. As a junior, WVU won the NIT, thanks to Nichols game-winning, buzzer-beating corner 3-pointer (video below) against Mississippi State to put the Mountaineers in the tournament title game at Madison Square Garden. After that NIT run, Beilein bolted for Michigan, and brought Huggins back to the place he starred as a point guard three decades earlier. Nichols immersed himself in Huggins' demanding style, setting a school record for minutes play his senior year, averaging 10.7 points, nearly 39 percent from the 3-point and carding a nearly 3-to-1 assist-to-turnover ration.

With Nichols running the show, the Mountaineers reached the NCAA Tournament, beat Arizona in the first round, shocked No. 7 and second-seeded Duke in the second, then dropped an overtime heartbreaker against Xavier in the Sweet 16. Nichols left an indelible mark on the program.

On Huggins, also.

"He had a really ugly-looking jump shot, but for some reason it went in," Huggins said Friday, before giving Nichols his due. "We played a lot of different defenses back then and Darris was a guy who really helped other guys get to where they were supposed to be. He had a great understanding of what we needed to get done. I think from the beginning he really wanted to learn. He was obviously very well versed in what John [Beilein] did, but what we do is different. There are similarities, obviously, but it was different. Darris picked it up very quickly. The great thing was, he didn't just pick it up. He helped people pick it up."

In the process, a coach was born.

Nichols tried to play professionally in Hungary, but a knee injury brought him back to Morgantown, where rehabbed while working part time as a valet at a downtown hotel in the morning and coming to watch Huggins' practices in the afternoon.

(Note: There was a nice restaurant at the hotel that Huggins would sometimes come to eat. Did Nichols ever park his car? "I wouldn't let him in my car.")

In time Nichols embraced the idea of getting into the profession. He became a WVU graduate assistant alongside Huggins and after one season got his first full-time job at Northern Kentucky. After two seasons there, it was on to Wofford to coach under Mike Young (now at Virginia Tech) for one season, then was lured to Louisiana Tech by Mike White in 2014.

A year later, White was hired to replace Billy Donovan at Florida and brought his entire staff with him. One assistant, Dusty May, left for Florida Atlantic two years ago. Nichols is looking like he could be the next branch of a White coaching tree.

"Darris has been so valuable to this program and these young men," White said of the coach who has recruited the likes of Keyontae Johnson, Scottie Lewis and Noah Locke. "This is our seventh season together at two different institutions. He's mature beyond his years, incredibly intelligent and ready to be a successful head coach."

For now, he'd rather be a successful assistant with a successful road trip to place he still holds near and dear to his heart, and a coach to which he owes the start to his career.

**Darris Nichols** (left) and **Bob Huggins** embrace for UF faced WVU in the 2016 SEC/Big 12 Challenge at the O'Connell Center, where the Gators routed the No. 9 Mountaineers 88-71, thanks to 12-for-20 shooting from the 3-point line.

"Obviously, the teams he's had over the years, you know what you're going to get every year," Nichols said of Huggins, who ranked fourth among active D-1 coaches (and eighth overall with 820 carer victories "The mold and what he tries to instill in his team has been the same."

Nichols was a standout prep player from Radford, Va., about four and a half hours from from Morgantown. He picked WVU and Beilein over Virginia Tech, Clemson, Tennessee and North Carolina State and, in time, will be able to say he played for two Hall of Famers. Charged with the scout for UF-WVU game, he spent the last two days educating the Gators on the strengths and tendencies of the Mountaineers, but also of a coach he knows will have his squad utterly prepared and ready to unleash as much hell as possible on the visitors.

And considering Florida already has two wins over West Virginia with Nichols and Huggins on opposite sidelines — the Gators beat the Mountaineers in the 2016 SEC/Big 12 Challenge at Gainesville, then again in the Jimmy Classic in 2018 in New York — the teacher may be particularly angled to get one back on the pupil.

In other words, it's about to get real.

"Relentless," Nichols said when asked to give one word to describe Huggins. "Whether it was practice, whether you had just won a big game and then you're moving on to the next game, with him, you just never feel really comfortable. He's not going to let anything slide. That's the main thing I took from him."