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MORGANTOWN - Now Josh Yeager knows what Lester Rowe was talking about.
Rowe is the West Virginia assistant basketball coach - now, by the way, officially an ex-assistant coach - who once played for Gale Catlett. And during the three years Yeager played for Catlett, Rowe would always tell him he should have seen Catlett in the old days.
"Coach Rowe always told me that I should have played here when he did and seen what Coach Catlett was like back then," Yeager said Thursday. "He was much more intense in those days. I think now I'm going to see something like that."
As a matter of fact, Yeager and the rest of the West Virginia basketball team are apparently in for a real lesson in intensity. And they didn't even have to wait for their first meeting with Dan Dakich to discover that.
All they had to was hang around during the Thursday press conference at which Dakich, 39, was introduced as the new WVU coach and Catlett's replacement.
"Wow. Now that guy is intense. You can tell that just by listening to him speak," said Yeager, one of a handful of Mountaineer players who were stationed around the Coliseum floor Thursday as Dakich was introduced. "Not that Coach Catlett wasn't, but he's younger and I don't think he'll put up with as much stuff as [Catlett] did."
Indeed, if one thing became apparent Thursday, it was that Dakich is a no-nonsense guy. Mere hours after he and West Virginia officials came to an agreement that made him the school's first new men's basketball coach in 24 years - and, at the same time,...