PARKERSBURG — Parkersburg High School 1991 graduate Phil Wilson couldn’t pass up the opportunity to throw his proverbial hat into the ring when the head coaching position for boys basketball opened up for the Big Reds.

Once Bryan Crislip resigned, Wilson prepared himself to become a second head coach at the school. Wilson is currently in year two of leading the girls soccer program at PHS.

“Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday of this week we got into the gym and really started working on skills and stuff like that,” said Wilson, who was officially hired a week ago Tuesday, of using some flex days.

“They started doing flex days with me this week. This is really the first full week I’ve had them. They’ve been in the gym shooting with one of the parents helping out.”

An education major at West Virginia State and West Virginia University at Parkersburg, Wilson left school to work in the oil and gas industry more than a decade ago.

“Most definitely,” Wilson expressed when asked if he was excited for the opportunity. “Who wouldn’t want to go back and coach at their alma mater and just be able to represent. Take what still is a great school and try to rebuild a program again.”

Wilson, who was an assistant boys coach at Belpre for a year, not only was an assistant under Kenny DeMoss, but also helped Scott Cozzens’ Big Reds to back-to-back Class AAA girls state crowns in 2018-19.

“We had some quality candidates with various experiences,” noted DeMoss, who is the principal at PHS. “What made Phil stand out the most was the combination of being a former player, being an alumnus, already currently coaching in this community, his total years of experience in coaching basketball, being a head coach of a program already here at PHS and understanding what it takes to run a program at this level, and knowing most of the players currently and coming up.

“He has the skill, the knowledge and the ability to lead our boys basketball program. To my knowledge, he also will be a couple firsts. The first alumni in over 50 years to coach this team and he is the first African American to ever be the head boys basketball coach at PHS. It’s an exciting time for our program!”

One thing anyone who plans to play for Wilson should know is defense matters.

“For me, most definitely,” Wilson said. “I haven’t coached a team ever in life where defense isn’t the top priority. The defense has to be up to par. It doesn’t serve me a whole lot of good if you can score 10, 15 points a game and you are giving up 10, 15 points a game.

“There has to be a happy medium in there where you can dominate the person you are guarding and dominate the person guarding you. From the kids showing up to the flex days, they all seem to be pretty excited and pretty receptive.”

Wilson admitted, “I sort of bring a different type of style, or different types of mannerisms to try and coach them up and promote them up and let them know they can do anything they want to if they put their minds to it and work toward it.

“Learn how to grow as a team, feed off each other and figure out each other’s strengths and weaknesses. That’s hard to do when you don’t have everyone there. We just got to change the culture a little bit and bring back PHS pride within those players.”

The new head man said the transition is going smoothly and it was good to be familiar with most of the players.

“We won the county championship in 2021 when I was co-coaching at Hamilton,” said the coach. “I coached a lot of those players when I was at Hamilton.

“A lot of these juniors and sophomores I’ve coached at some point in time or been around them.”

Ideally, Wilson said he’d like to play uptempo and have an aggressive defense, but he’ll have to wait until he sees the roster before figuring out what’s best for the team.

“We don’t have the luxury of being college coaches and recruiting who you want,” he said. “You get what you get and we have to adjust with what we got. Really, going through and evaluating everyone and determining who can play where and well, and see who our defensive dogs are. Come out if you think you can play and if you consider yourself a baller.

“Let’s put you on the court and see who you are, if you can help build this team and help build this program and culture back up. We’d be more than happy to have you. We are looking for strong, mentally positive kids who want to grind, put in the work and don’t mind the sweat equity you have to put into this to get the max results you want out of it.”

Contact Jay Bennett at jbennett@newsandsentinel.com