West Virginia University’s JJ Quinerly drives to the basket during the Mountaineers’ game against Wright State on Monday in Morgantown. Photo courtesy of BlueGoldNews.com

MORGANTOWN — It was one of those days when nothing was right for your team, as West Virginia’s women’s basketball learned on Monday.

A day earlier, in his pre-bowl game press conference, football coach Neal Brown had talked about how things go on a rhythm for a sports team and they are comfortable with it. You practice at a certain time, you eat a certain, you work out at a certain time.

Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt in athletics, it builds confidence.

Then along comes a Monday like the one WVU’s women faced. First off, it was a morning game, Education Day, they called it and the crowd of 7,535 fans were mostly screeching school children, filling the Coliseum with a different sound than is normal.

“It was loud, kind of crazy loud at times, but it was fun,” WVU coach Mark Kellogg admitted. “It was a great environment.”

That was not the only thing weird.

“The whole day was weird. Everything about it was weird. From the early start, we didn’t have an early shootaround, we didn’t have a pregame meal. It felt weird. The whole game felt weird. I was searching like heck for anything that would work,” Kellogg said.

“I’m still evaluating this one in my mind as a coach to try and figure out if there was anything I could have done as a coach to do a better job or more to help the group because we just weren’t great today. But I’d rather win and figure out I have to get better than take a loss and have to figure out how to get better.”

The opponent, Wright State of Dayton, wasn’t the kind of team that was supposed to offer much competition. WVU was unbeaten, looking for its 10th straight, ranked No. 21 in the NCAA’s NET and hoping to crack the Top 25 of traditional polls on this day (didn’t happen, BTW).

Figured to be an easy win against a team that had played one Top 25 team, Michigan State and had lost by 44 points.

But, it turned out, that all the factors around the game converged into a storm of trouble for the Mountaineers, who fell behind early, couldn’t shake out of it before halftime, led for only eight minutes in the game but, when the Mountaineer’s musket went off, they escaped with a 77-72 victory.

They had to do it the hard way, including playing the last four minutes without their star, JJ Quinerly, who somehow managed a career-high 39 points before fouling out, leaving her team to adjust down the stretch.

Incredibly, Quinerly wasn’t the high scorer on the floor for the game, scoring honors going to Alexis Hutchinson, who notched her own career-high 37 points on a dazzling display of shot making from up close and from afar.

“The Hutchinson kid was phenomenal. I don’t know if anyone has ever scored 37 against one of our teams. We threw a lot at her and nothing seemed to work. We tried to tire her out. We tried to eliminate her because she was the head of the snake the way that game was going,” Kellogg said.

She made it so difficult that with 7:35 left Kellogg had to call a timeout with his team trailing, 60-55, not so much for strategy as for attitude adjustment.

His talk to his ladies was about toughness, mental toughness, about finding that something extra great teams find down the stretch.

“They’re tired,” he said into an open TV microphone. “They have to be more tired than you are.”

And after the game, when asked the gist of that timeout, he described it thusly:

“I told them show me your guts. You have to gut this thing out. It’s not going to be pretty. It’s not going to be beautiful basketball. Just have some guts about you and figure out how to get this done, which, of course, we did,” Kellogg said.

“They had more toughness than us early,” said Jordan Harrison, the guard who had 18 points. “They were trying to do us, more than us.”

With Quinerly out, WVU began going inside, which was supposed to be the plan from the start and, in the end, the Mountaineers survived their first real scare of the season.