Word: schaus
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Stay Home & Known. With such home-state support, Fred Schaus (rhymes with spouse) has built the most successful team in college basketball out of a band of boys from West Virginia and neighboring Pennsylvania. In other years, Schaus's boys from back home too often panicked at the first tweak of big-time pressure; last year, for example, West Virginia collapsed in the first round of the N.C.A.A. tournament. But this year the Mountaineers went at it with slick skill, won the high-pressure Kentucky Invitational tournament by snapping the winning streak (at 37) of North Carolina, last year...
...Fred Schaus knows all about hard, high-pressure basketball; he used to play it himself. As a teenager, he was good enough to make the wartime Great Lakes Naval Training Station team, later played so well for West Virginia that the professional Fort Wayne Pistons tapped him after his junior year. Schaus turned pro, managed to get his B.S. (major: physical education) before going off to play with the Pistons for four years, three as captain. In 1954, when West Virginia Basketball Coach Robert N. ("Red") Brown moved up to athletic director, Schaus was his logical successor...
...Schaus soon found that the West Virginia hills grow a hardy breed of human kangaroos on high school basketball courts, now sets out night after night over the winding West Virginia roads in his 1957 Chevrolet to search for talent at high school games. Ohio-born Coach Schaus uses a recruiting argument that seems to work: he went out of his state to play ball, he explains, and now is almost a stranger back home. The moral: stay home and stay known...
...cultivating his backyard (with an occasional foray into Pennsylvania), Schaus has created an anomaly in big-time college basketball: a home-grown team. North Carolina combs the New York subway circuit for its players, and Kansas stretched out to Philadelphia for Wilt ("The Stilt") Chamberlain. But Schaus finds his stars in towns like East Bank (pop. 1,500) and Shinnston (pop. 2,793). As a result, the state rightly looks on the team as its own, not a high-priced import, follows its games with chauvinistic zeal...
...Conditioned Reflex." At 32, Schaus is a boyish, genial giant (6 ft. 5 in., 220 lbs.) who still can mix it up with his team in practice, still share his team's private jokes. But he is also a solid tactician who builds his offense around a whirling fast break led by Forward Bob Smith, insists on a dogged, man-to-man defense...