JJ Quinerly at her best as West Virginia women prep for BYU

West Virginia's JJ Quinerly handles the ball during a game earlier this season. (Photo by BlueGoldNews.com)
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Was Wednesday’s scoring barrage of 31 points against UCF from star West Virginia guard JJ Quinerly a sign that she’s ready to light up the new year with her best play or simply the loud sounding pop of a New Year’s champagne cork from a bottle that will soon run dry?
WVU’s Mark Kellogg believes she benefited greatly from the 10-day holiday break the Mountaineers went on after a stunning fourth quarter collapse in their Big 12 opener at Colorado that led to a 65-60 defeat and is ready to put the Mountaineers on her shoulders and carry them through the long, trying conference schedule.
“JJ was fantastic,” Kellogg gushed following the 80-58 victory over UCF at home on New Year’s Day. “She looked different when she came back. She looked great in practice. She’s got her mind cleared and maybe the break was great for JJ.”
Kellogg will find out if he’s right about the return to All-American form for when the No. 18 Mountaineer women return to the home court at 6 p.m. On Saturday to take on a BYU team that owns an impressive 9-3 season record but a far from impressive 0-2 start to their Big 12 season with losses to Arizona and Cincinnati.
While statistically there wasn’t anything significantly different between her performance last year and this, her numbers were trending downward. Last year she averaged 19.7 points a game, this year 18.7 and her shooting percentage had slipped from 46.2 to 43.5 and her 3-point shooting showed a similar decline from 34.4 to 31.6.
More to the point, she wasn’t dominating games as she had. Last year she had six 20-points-or-more games in WVU’s first 12, this year it was 3 three games.
But after the break, she seemed to put everything together, coming out with 17 first-quarter points and finishing with 31 points while hitting 11 of 19 shots.
Kellogg hinted that there was less fundamentally wrong with Quinerly’s game and that it was more of a mental problem.
He believes she straightened that out over the break.
“I think there was a lot on her mind early, some off the court, some on the court; probably her future and what basketball might look like down the road for her,” Kellogg said. “If she will stay in the present, she’s pretty talented. There’s a lot these kids go through and we don’t always know about. I’m not saying she did, but I think there was a lot.
“She’s in a good spot right now and that’s good. There’s a lot of basketball ahead of us.”
It’s different being a star women’s basketball player today than it once was. There is NIL and money involved, a transfer portal and the great success and popularity that Iowa’s Caitlin Clark brought to the game has changed so many of the options that women’s stars now have.
Players that Quinerly have far more riding on their performance than they previously did and that can affect their outlook on the game and distract them from what is really important, being a good player in the moment.
“I don’t know if that’s always the case, but for a lot of kids it is,” Kellogg said. “It’s always themselves. Who is going to limit JJ? It’s probably JJ herself or Coach Kellogg not getting her the ball enough, the dummy. It shouldn’t be that way with a kid as talented as that. When she plays freely, she’s certainly dynamic.”
If Quinerly reaches the heights she was at last year alongside the ever improving Jordan Harrison, who makes all those around her better, and if Sydney Shaw’s performance against UCF was the real her with five 3s and 10 points, the WVU women may just be heating up for a big run in conference play.