2023 Recruiting


Grace Larkins from USD was summit 6th player of the year and then 1st team. She played in a sweet 16. She will be a junior. I would take her in a heartbeat. Especially losing Dom. I’d also really like the 2 wv commits from wisconsin and Frannje Hottinger. I know I’ve said this before, but I just thought people needed to know my hopes and dreams.
Larkins is very good but small in the big ten with bigger guards she has problems if a team has a shot blocker she has trouble. I heard she might be in the portal so who knows Dawn left the team in a mess but they will rebound next year Smartly she didn't follow coach to WV like Watson
 

F Grace Grocholski, 5-10, Kettle Moraine (Wales, WI) – Signed (confirmed by WVU Sports Information)

F Ayianna Johnson, 6-3, Jefferson, (Jefferson, WI) – Signed (confirmed by WVU Sports Information)

In terms of two WV 2023 recruits.. Hearing thet Grocholski is about 80% likely to come to Minnesota and Johnson is a 50/50 shot at the staff trying to bring her over to gophers as well.

Just a reminder at this time, counting for players medically retiring, in portal, and what is expected to stay, Gophers have 10 scholarships filled so far in 23-24 with possibly 5 openings for grad transfers, portal players or the two 2023 players listed above.
 

F Grace Grocholski, 5-10, Kettle Moraine (Wales, WI) – Signed (confirmed by WVU Sports Information)

F Ayianna Johnson, 6-3, Jefferson, (Jefferson, WI) – Signed (confirmed by WVU Sports Information)

In terms of two WV 2023 recruits.. Hearing thet Grocholski is about 80% likely to come to Minnesota and Johnson is a 50/50 shot at the staff trying to bring her over to gophers as well.

Just a reminder at this time, counting for players medically retiring, in portal, and what is expected to stay, Gophers have 10 scholarships filled so far in 23-24 with possibly 5 openings for grad transfers, portal players or the two 2023 players listed above.
Nice! I think both would have a chance at playing as freshman. Depending on who else comes. I’m hoping for both.
 

Nice! I think both would have a chance at playing as freshman. Depending on who else comes. I’m hoping for both.
She will take Watson too and maybe a guard off of the WV roster
 


She will take Watson too and maybe a guard off of the WV roster
WE just can't take players off rosters.. they have to ENTER the portal.. and I haven't see Watson or Larkins in the portal yet.. I'd much rather get a few kids out of the portal then getting players from WV/SD..
 

Watson was in the portal last year may be harder this time but she followed Dawn from South Dakota and the two are close. Not sure if she is a big ten player should return to USD. I would be surprised if Larkin would enter the portal. JJ Quinerly of WV is one of the best guards in the country .
 

Watson was in the portal last year may be harder this time but she followed Dawn from South Dakota and the two are close. Not sure if she is a big ten player should return to USD. I would be surprised if Larkin would enter the portal. JJ Quinerly of WV is one of the best guards in the country .
I would take Watson over Quinerly, if either were to enter the portal. Kyah Watson does all of the little stuff that does not show up on the stat book. She is a tough, smart player, and is aware of what is going on around her. Yes, she is under-sized, but she plays much bigger than her size. I don’t know that she would be able to play right away though, unless she manages her graduation situation. Otherwise she would have to sit a year.
 







here are some highlights of Grace during her high school career

 




According to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinal article, "The relationships are what mattered most to Grace Grocholski."

According to Grocholski, Plitzuweit's team plays similar to her club team, the Wisconsin Lakers, running motion offense and rely on three-point shooting."









The article mentioned running motion offense and three-point shooting. I know about the importance of perimeter shooting in modern basketball but less clear about how they run motion offense.







"Spacing, offensive efficiency, player versatility, making the proper reads and not having just one primary ball handler were some of the things she mentioned today. We used to hear some of the same things come out of John Beilein's mouth whenever he described his motion offense.

Actually, motion offense has been a big part of West Virginia's basketball heritage going back to the late 1940s with Lee Patton, into the 1950s with Fred Schaus and continuing into the 1960s with George King. Today, Bob Huggins has his version of the motion offense on the other side of the Basketball Practice Facility.

But getting back to King, he never had any set plays, according to Rod Thorn, but rather five players reading each other and playing off those reads. The ball moved until an area opened to be exploited, the key being the ball was never stuck in one place; it was always moving.

"In our motion offense, it's not as if we're trying to drive into one area," Plitzuweit explained. "It's not like we set up our offense so we can drive middle, or we set up our offense so we can drive baseline or drive down the rails. Our offense is set up to where you can get those type of drives within any possession, but we don't even know when that's going to happen because it depends upon the actions of the other players.

"Slowing down and reading … 'this isn't my gap right now even though last possession I got a great middle drive …' The middle is plugged up, so the option is to drive to the baseline. The key is understanding when to do what," she continued. "When should they back cut? When should they pop? When should they curl? When should they screen versus someone else screening for them? All those things take a little bit of time."

Again, these are concepts we readily recall from Beilein's days here. Interestingly enough, Plitzuweit got an opportunity to watch some of Beilein's practices when the two were together at Michigan.

And she was clearly paying attention, even if she couldn't figure out some of the unusual things he'd say during practice, or some of the oddball plays he'd call out such as "double quickie potato" or the "greatest play ever." Despite his sometimes-confusing vernacular, the methodology of teaching was brilliantly simple.

"I do think there are a lot of similarities in terms of how we break things down and we teach and how we simplify things," she admitted. "We don't use his exact terminology, but it was interesting watching his practices. He would tell his guys, not exactly, but 'we're going to play hockey and after hockey we're playing baseball and then the quarterback is going to throw it.' I'm thinking, what is he talking about?

"But his guys knew exactly what it meant," she said. "Baseball meant this, and hockey meant this, and it was simplified for his players. We have tried to do that to the best of our ability so that they can understand.

"The bottom line is, if we have great spacing offensively, then we get some movement that's hard to guard, and we have players who can score from different ways; we're not doing really anything that's complicated," she said. "We're just trying to play basic, simple, fundamental basketball and make reads. That can be really challenging to guard."

On several different occasions this morning, Plitzuweit referenced her system – something Beilein used to do constantly.

"The better the athlete, the higher the basketball IQ, the easier it is to run our system," he would say, or "The better the players, the better our system works."

Beilein was protective of his system, and it would irritate him whenever people compared it to Pete Carril's old Princeton offense or to Tex Winters' Triangle Offense. He said the roots of what he did originated from the two-guard offense that he developed at LeMoyne College aimed at freeing up shooters on drives and kicks, or back-door cuts to the basket.

"If the Princeton is Japanese, we're Chinese and the Triangle might be Korean," Beilein once said. "They may not be the same languages, but there's similar phonics there."

Along those lines, Plitzuweit's motion system is probably Vietnamese then.

One other notable aspect of her system that will become familiar to older Mountaineer fans is her willingness to use early offense.

Gale Catlett used to have great success with early offense during his days at WVU in the 1980s and 1990s. His reasoning was simple - it's a helluva lot easier to score four-on-three or three-on-two in the open court than it is five-on-five when the defense is set.

"The first thing I was taught in college from Fred Schaus was to get the ball off the backboard and get down on the fast break and get the numbers," Catlett once explained. "You get the easiest shots you can ever get if you get the numbers on the break, so what we tried to get was two-on-one or three-on-two. All the good coaches I was ever around did this."

Plitzuweit admitted today that her idea for early offense came from studying the Dayton men's and women's teams, both of whom were using a version of it popularized by the Phoenix Suns.

"We actually started implementing it when I was at Northern Kentucky, but we couldn't call it 'Phoenix' because in our league we had the Green Bay Fighting Phoenix," she laughed. "We had a different name for it and now it's just our early offense or attack mode.

"We're not very far into it, and we really haven't done it as much against defenses as we'd like, but at the same time, everybody wants to play fast and have some fun doing that. And we have some speed, so why not?"

Why not?

There are a lot of good, sound concepts that you will be seeing from Plitzuweit's team this year - things that have been really successful in some manner or form here in the past.

Only now, it will be her twist on things.

West Virginia is three official practices into its preseason ahead of its 2022-23 opener against USC Upstate on Thursday, Nov. 10, at the WVU Coliseum. Season tickets are currently on sale and can be purchased by logging on to WVUGAME.com."












Coach P seems to be effective at defense, perimeter shooting, and now these motion offense concepts.

 
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#98 per ESPN HoopGurlz. Caution, though, because this is just a starting point. Expect outperformers and over-ratings.

1679877019342.png


PrepGirlsHoops has Grocholski the #2 state prospect. The #1 prospect is going to UConn. #3 is Ayianna Johnson.

1679877163946.png
 









The article mentioned running motion offense and three-point shooting. I know about the importance of perimeter shooting in modern basketball but less clear about how they run motion offense.







"Spacing, offensive efficiency, player versatility, making the proper reads and not having just one primary ball handler were some of the things she mentioned today. We used to hear some of the same things come out of John Beilein's mouth whenever he described his motion offense.

Actually, motion offense has been a big part of West Virginia's basketball heritage going back to the late 1940s with Lee Patton, into the 1950s with Fred Schaus and continuing into the 1960s with George King. Today, Bob Huggins has his version of the motion offense on the other side of the Basketball Practice Facility.

But getting back to King, he never had any set plays, according to Rod Thorn, but rather five players reading each other and playing off those reads. The ball moved until an area opened to be exploited, the key being the ball was never stuck in one place; it was always moving.

"In our motion offense, it's not as if we're trying to drive into one area," Plitzuweit explained. "It's not like we set up our offense so we can drive middle, or we set up our offense so we can drive baseline or drive down the rails. Our offense is set up to where you can get those type of drives within any possession, but we don't even know when that's going to happen because it depends upon the actions of the other players.

"Slowing down and reading … 'this isn't my gap right now even though last possession I got a great middle drive …' The middle is plugged up, so the option is to drive to the baseline. The key is understanding when to do what," she continued. "When should they back cut? When should they pop? When should they curl? When should they screen versus someone else screening for them? All those things take a little bit of time."

Again, these are concepts we readily recall from Beilein's days here. Interestingly enough, Plitzuweit got an opportunity to watch some of Beilein's practices when the two were together at Michigan.

And she was clearly paying attention, even if she couldn't figure out some of the unusual things he'd say during practice, or some of the oddball plays he'd call out such as "double quickie potato" or the "greatest play ever." Despite his sometimes-confusing vernacular, the methodology of teaching was brilliantly simple.

"I do think there are a lot of similarities in terms of how we break things down and we teach and how we simplify things," she admitted. "We don't use his exact terminology, but it was interesting watching his practices. He would tell his guys, not exactly, but 'we're going to play hockey and after hockey we're playing baseball and then the quarterback is going to throw it.' I'm thinking, what is he talking about?

"But his guys knew exactly what it meant," she said. "Baseball meant this, and hockey meant this, and it was simplified for his players. We have tried to do that to the best of our ability so that they can understand.

"The bottom line is, if we have great spacing offensively, then we get some movement that's hard to guard, and we have players who can score from different ways; we're not doing really anything that's complicated," she said. "We're just trying to play basic, simple, fundamental basketball and make reads. That can be really challenging to guard."

On several different occasions this morning, Plitzuweit referenced her system – something Beilein used to do constantly.

"The better the athlete, the higher the basketball IQ, the easier it is to run our system," he would say, or "The better the players, the better our system works."

Beilein was protective of his system, and it would irritate him whenever people compared it to Pete Carril's old Princeton offense or to Tex Winters' Triangle Offense. He said the roots of what he did originated from the two-guard offense that he developed at LeMoyne College aimed at freeing up shooters on drives and kicks, or back-door cuts to the basket.

"If the Princeton is Japanese, we're Chinese and the Triangle might be Korean," Beilein once said. "They may not be the same languages, but there's similar phonics there."

Along those lines, Plitzuweit's motion system is probably Vietnamese then.

One other notable aspect of her system that will become familiar to older Mountaineer fans is her willingness to use early offense.

Gale Catlett used to have great success with early offense during his days at WVU in the 1980s and 1990s. His reasoning was simple - it's a helluva lot easier to score four-on-three or three-on-two in the open court than it is five-on-five when the defense is set.

"The first thing I was taught in college from Fred Schaus was to get the ball off the backboard and get down on the fast break and get the numbers," Catlett once explained. "You get the easiest shots you can ever get if you get the numbers on the break, so what we tried to get was two-on-one or three-on-two. All the good coaches I was ever around did this."

Plitzuweit admitted today that her idea for early offense came from studying the Dayton men's and women's teams, both of whom were using a version of it popularized by the Phoenix Suns.

"We actually started implementing it when I was at Northern Kentucky, but we couldn't call it 'Phoenix' because in our league we had the Green Bay Fighting Phoenix," she laughed. "We had a different name for it and now it's just our early offense or attack mode.

"We're not very far into it, and we really haven't done it as much against defenses as we'd like, but at the same time, everybody wants to play fast and have some fun doing that. And we have some speed, so why not?"

Why not?

There are a lot of good, sound concepts that you will be seeing from Plitzuweit's team this year - things that have been really successful in some manner or form here in the past.

Only now, it will be her twist on things.

West Virginia is three official practices into its preseason ahead of its 2022-23 opener against USC Upstate on Thursday, Nov. 10, at the WVU Coliseum. Season tickets are currently on sale and can be purchased by logging on to WVUGAME.com."







View attachment 24813




Coach P seems to be effective at defense, perimeter shooting, and now these motion offense concepts.

with your long post.. maybe figure out a way not to have one POST take up a whole page.. just leave the links and people will go read the stories if they want too.. just a suggestion.
 


I keep hearing people talk like we have lost Dominika Paurova for this Fall but all I had heard was that she had requested the info to get released from her NLI. That doesn't mean she filed it. If it was a done deal you think we would get the standard I have reopened my recruitment announcement on her twitter account, but we haven't.


I think that is a good sign that Dom (as the team calls her) is still talking to Coach Dawn and still giving them the chance to resell her on the direction of the program.
 

I keep hearing people talk like we have lost Dominika Paurova for this Fall but all I had heard was that she had requested the info to get released from her NLI. That doesn't mean she filed it. If it was a done deal you think we would get the standard I have reopened my recruitment announcement on her twitter account, but we haven't.


I think that is a good sign that Dom (as the team calls her) is still talking to Coach Dawn and still giving them the chance to resell her on the direction of the program.
Her school has posted she is back on the market.

 

Her school has posted she is back on the market.

That's unfortunate as not many freshmen walk in with that level of experience that she had. Hard to complain though with the recent announcement from Grace Grocholski. We're definitely moving in the right direction.
 

Great defensive players have a spot anywhere. I'm sure if Lexi Donarski had any interest in Minnesota, coach P and staff would be interested in bringing her in to the Gopher WBB.
She was one of the best players in Wiscosin. Would be a great PG
 

Great defensive players have a spot anywhere. I'm sure if Lexi Donarski had any interest in Minnesota, coach P and staff would be interested in bringing her in to the Gopher WBB.
She was one of the best players in Wiscosin. Would be a great PG

Seems like a good pickup if that's even possible? Who then starts where? There would be minutes to go around for sure.

-Elite defender. One season was Big 12 Defensive Player of the Year.

-One season was Big 12 First Team.

-Averaed 13.2 points and 3.2 rebounds per game over her career.

-Big 12 Freshman of the Year.

-McDonald's All-American.

From LaCrosee, Wisconisin.


This last season was good but not as good as previous years.

-Averaged 12.1 points per game this season.

-.318 3-point shooting percentage this season. Averaged 2.6 assists per game.

This season made All Big-12 Honorable Mention.
 

The era of NIL.


For those who do not know, that's Maya Nnaji of Hopkins, MN who signed with Arizona. I'm happy for her and well deserved. She's a great player. It also underscores the tough dynamics of this new era of NIL. I think Coyle said something about it turned sports upside down.




 

Let’s keep these quality transfers coming - Go Gophers !
I agree but technically we don’t have any transfers in yet. Grocholski is Coach P’s first Gopher recruit.

But speaking of potential transfers, has anyone heard anything concrete about Lauren Ware being in the portal? She’s been hurt for two straight seasons at Arizona, but played a decent amount on their championship team. We were a finalist first go-round, and I’m sure being from the Dakotas she was on Coach P’s radar at South Dakota before her recruiting profile took off and she had her choice of high major programs.
 

I agree but technically we don’t have any transfers in yet. Grocholski is Coach P’s first Gopher recruit.

But speaking of potential transfers, has anyone heard anything concrete about Lauren Ware being in the portal? She’s been hurt for two straight seasons at Arizona, but played a decent amount on their championship team. We were a finalist first go-round, and I’m sure being from the Dakotas she was on Coach P’s radar at South Dakota before her recruiting profile took off and she had her choice of high major programs.
https://www.inforum.com/sports/college/bismarcks-ware-enters-transfer-portal-leaves-arizona https://www.azdesertswarm.com/baske...izona-womens-basketball-players-in-the-portal According to Tucson.com Lauren practiced with the team the last month of this season. Didn't want to waste eligibility for one month kept her redshirt.
 


There are lots of "under the radar" prospects in this region that coaches like Coach P and Aaron Johnston showed in the state of South Dakota that you can win with.


Hopefully Coach P can bring a couple of these players in each year over the next several years. If it wasn't for Coach P bringing in G Money from Wisconsin, the Gophers wouldn't have a single player coming in this season from the region. Coach has shown she can find winning talent maybe others overlook.


Header to SDSU, from South Dakota


Headed to Nebraska, from North Dakota


From South Dakota
 

These are the top 2023 recruits in the upper Midwest and where they committed:

From South Dakota 2023
PrepGirlsHoops
1682075984746.png

From Wisconsin 2023
PrepGirlsHoops
(Grocholski is a Plitzuweit commit following from WV to MN)
1682076239471.png



Minnesota 2023
PrepGirlsHoops
(Klick is a Whalen MN commit)

1682076436218.png


Illinois 2023
PrepGirlsHoops
1682076361015.png

Michigan 2023
PrepGirlsHoops
1682076673714.png


North Dakota 2023
PrepGirlsHoops

1682076076046.png
 

Wing/forward Grace Grocholski. We'll be hearing her name a lot the next few years. Top-100 (in the 80s) and probably underrated. Correction: way underrated.

 




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