Baker Talks His Preferred Timeline in West Virginia Coaching Search

West Virginia director of athletics Wren Baker talked about his preferred timeline when going about the men’s basketball coaching search. Baker told the media basketball can be difficult to search with the NCAA, NIT and CBI tournaments going on during the rest of the month.

“Certainly I would hope we can get a search completed by the Final Four or not really close to there. I would hope we can get it done sooner,” Baker said.

The Final Four will take place on Saturday, April 6 with the National Championship game on Monday, April 8 in Phoenix, Az.

“My hope would be we could go quickly. We certainly have had enough time to study profiles and all of that,” Baker added.

West Virginia moved on from interim HC Josh Eilert on Wednesday. Eilert replaced Bob Huggins last June after his resignation. While the job technically has been open for the last nine months, Baker has had an eye out for potential candidates.

During the next few days, teams will find out their fate with what tournament they will be participating in. On Monday, right after Selection Sunday, the transfer portal will officially open up for basketball student-athletes to figure out what they want to do this spring. So there are a lot of moving parts in the month of March. West Virginia has been linked with many coaches that are in the tournament, or projected to be in one: Mark Byington (JMU), Darian DeVries (Drake), Niko Medved (Colorado State) just to name some examples.

“Basketball is a harder one to pin down because of the way the postseason is structured. You have candidates who are in the postseason and once Selection Sunday comes out, they have to prepare for three opponents in a week they probably haven’t seen before,” Baker said. “Getting somebody to unplug from that and to plug into your search is pretty difficult.”

Baker talked about various topics with the media on Wednesday about the job itself, as well as Josh Eilert and Bob Huggins. Click here to watch Baker’s full 30-minute conversation.

Watch: WVU AD Wren Baker Adresses Media About MBB Job Opening