John Beilein, left, talks with 2019 Big Ten Conference Freshman of the Year Iggy Brazdeikis. Courtesy photo

SHEPHERDSTOWN — If he were still involved in coaching basketball at the college level, one of John Beilein’s concerns or worries would not be the transfer portal.

His personality was not abrasive, nor was it wrapped carefully in self-importance or being chased by media types.

Beilein came through the coaching ranks for years and years without the notice from outside his players or those close to his programs.

He began in the junior college ranks at Erie Community College, in extreme western New York. Then, he went to Nazareth, a Division III school with no athletic scholarships.

Later, he was quietly coaching at LeMoyne, still in western New York but a Division II school.

Canisius called him to the Division I ranks, and from there he transitioned to Richmond in 1997.

It was in 2002, that Beilein brought his “player first” philosophy to West Virginia University.

Mainly because of his winning records at all the other places he had been, WVU was interested in him and his penchant for heavily promoting the “three-point basket” and having teams with unselfish players who rallied around each other and their underdog status.

Beilein actually came to WVU in the midst of a coaching carousel that had Dan Dakich hired, only to see him then refuse the job and resign eight days later.

All along his below-the-radar coaching path Beilein was quietly building a reputation as the “cleanest coach in college basketball” — recruiting players with solid academic backgrounds and not using anything but NCAA-approved scholarship money to get them to commit to WVU and elsewhere.

Beilein’s “three-point” Mountaineers won the National Invitational Tournament (NIT) in 2007, improving his coaching record in Morgantown to 104-60.

By that time, he had become the first coach in collegiate circles to win at least 20 games in a season at four different levels — junior college, Division III, Division II and Division I.

He was hired by Michigan after the 2007 season. And it became a running joke among Wolverine fans and backers that, “We like your basketball coach, but you can keep your football coach.” Former Mountaineer football coach Rich Rodriguez had been hired by Michigan and had not found but very little success in his short term as protector of the Maize and Blue in the Big Hose stadium that seats well over 100,000. Rodriguez lasted three years in Ann Arbor before inauspiciously being “relieved of his duties.”

Beilein’s Wolverines reached the NCAA Tournament’s championship games on two occasions. He became that school’s winningest coach of all-time.

Then he was hired by the Cleveland Cavaliers of the NBA, where his success was so scant that he resigned during his first season.

The National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame just named Beilein to its 2022 class of inductees. Coaches Roy Williams, Jim Calhoun, Lon Kruger and Jerry Krause were also named as were players Frank Selvy (who once scored 100 points in a game for Furman against Newberry), Jimmy Walker (Providence), Larry Miller (North Carolina) and Richard Hamilton (Connecticut).

Players didn’t transfer away from Beilein’s quiet ways that stayed focused mainly on their achievements, their few short seasons as college athletes and the comfort of playing for coaches you liked and teammates you also liked.

John Beilein was not only the cleanest coach in college basketball he was the most attentive to his players’ needs and their satisfactions as athletes.