West Virginia University’s Da’Sean Butler felt the love long before he became King of the Buzzer Beaters and one of the school’s all-time great basketball players.

Something about Morgantown resonated with him, starting with his first visit.

“I met a lot of people when I came here and everybody was really, genuinely kind,” Butler said just before he and the rest of the No. 6 Mountaineers (27-6) headed to Buffalo, NY, for a first round game in the NCAA basketball tournament.

“At first, I thought it was kind of a fake kind of thing going on,” said Butler, a native of Newark, NJ. “I went to other campuses and other cities and everybody was like, ‘Nice to meet you,’ and then went about their business.”

But it wasn’t that way in Morgantown. “People here were like, ‘Where are you from? What high school did you go to? How are you guys doing?’ They’re genuinely interested. It was like that when I came here to school too,” he said.

Click to hear Da'Sean Butler

From his days as a freshman under then-coach John Beilein to his heroics as a senior under Bob Huggins, the love affair between Butler and West Virginia has grown beyond the borders of the University City.

After his last-second shot beat Georgetown for the Big East tournament championship, Butler, named the tourney’s Most Outstanding Player, proclaimed: “We wanted to win this for our state (West Virginia) first, because the people there love us so much and they support us so much. We have a lot of people depending on us to do a lot, especially in our state. That was our main concern, not letting the state down.”

That comment even caught the attention of some others, with one public relations professional using it as an example of the impact of honest, sincere communication.

“As long as they are sincere, these are the kind of quotes that will endear athletes and coaches to their fans and perhaps even the casual watcher,” wrote Tripp Frohlichstein. “One Georgetown student wrote me after hearing these quotes, ‘When he said that last night, along with some other really nice stuff about team and fans, I was not really even that mad that those guys won. Had I not been a Hoya, I’d actually have been rooting for Huggy’s Mountaineers.’ “

But Butler is not alone in this feeling.

Many of his teammates have expressed the same sentiment, and used that responsibility as motivation as they prepared to meet No. 15 seed Morgan State (27-9) Friday (March 19).

“We’re blue collar workers and that’s West Virginia as a state – they’re just workers,” said forward Wellington Smith, a product of Summit, N.J. “If we don’t work hard on Friday then that persona changes and that’s the last thing people will remember us by. We want to work as hard as we can so that doesn’t happen.”

Click to hear Wellington Smith

Butler and Smith, the team’s only seniors, have had four years to absorb the personality and passion of West Virginia and its citizens but, at times, even they may have not grasped its scope. After a particularly lackluster home loss to Villanova late in the year, Huggins reminded his players that their performances far transcend the win-loss columns.

“Very few people have a chance to be special, particularly in West Virginia,” Huggins told WVU play-by-play man Tony Caridi after the loss. “Pittsburgh had great basketball, but it was not the Steelers. Cincinnati had great basketball when I was there, but it was not the Reds. We have a chance to represent this state and bring so much pride and joy.”

In the locker room, the coach shared with the players “letters from different people all over the state telling him how proud of us they were or how disappointed in us they were,” Smith said. “It’s little things like that that you don’t realize.”

“These people love the team and love sports in general,” Butler said. “They love everything about the school.”

Another reminder came Sunday, when the team returned home from its title run. Hundreds of fans gathered at the airport in Clarksburg and at the Coliseum in Morgantown to celebrate the Mountaineers’ first basketball championship of any kind since their 1984 Atlantic 10 title.

Every member of the team thanked the fans and followers of the team from all over the state and nation. Junior forward John Flowers took things a step further by posting a long list of reasons he loved fans of the Mountaineers on his Twitter page.

The frenzy continues to build as WVU takes its next steps toward a national title. Lesson learned from Villanova, the Mountaineers are acknowledging and openly embracing their fan support.

“They understand how much it means to the people in the state of West Virginia. And they understand how much it means to the students at our university, and that’s because they are part of it. They’ve done an unbelievable job of becoming part of the community,” Huggins said. “And it’s like the governor told them ? ‘You are all West Virginians and you’re always going to be.’ And I think they appreciated that and they take that to heart.”

By Dan Shrensky
Communications Specialist
NIS News and Information Services

-WVU-

ds/3/17/10

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