MORGANTOWN — Like a car on a cold winter’s morning, it took No. 16 West Virginia a while to heat up in their opening game of the 2024-25 season, but once they did, they put it in high gear and turned it loose in beating Towson, 85-41, before 2,079 fans at the Coliseum.

Towson, playing without its starting point guard and coming off a 20-win season, stayed with the Mountaineers through the first quarter, trailing by just a point, 14-13. And there was a point early in the second quarter when the Tigers wrestled an 18-17 lead from a sluggish Mountaineer team.

But things were about to change.

Last year, the Mountaineers were built around a Big Two of guards JJ Quinerly and Jordan Harrison, but Coach Mark Kellogg went out and brought in Auburn transfer Sydney Shaw and if the opener was any indication, it is now a Big Three.

It was Shaw who put her foot on the gas pedal and peeled out, leading WVU on a 13-0 run to establish some distance and establish their dominance. She would finish 19 points while giving WVU just what it was looking for, that being a dependable outside threat.

A 5-9 junior, Shaw’s Auburn statistics did nothing to indicate she would be this productive, although Kellogg was certain she was the answer to what he was looking for. She played in all 32 games at Auburn last year, starting 18, and averaged just 6.6 points in 21.5 minutes a game.

But looking a little deeper into the stats she was Auburn’s second-leading 3-point shooter, making 35 of them while shooting 33% from 3 in an offense that wasn’t asking her to do that.

Shaw hit 7 of 9 shots against Towson, fluidly canning 5 of 6 from 3, something that is going to force teams to guard her to open driving lanes for Harrison and Quinerly.

Harrison put together one of her finest games with a career-high 23 points, adding 8 assists and 6 of what grew to be 17 steals.

All in all, WVU’s pressure on a team without its top point guard just destroyed them, forcing 32 turnovers that produced 42 points, nearly half their total … And it could have been much worse had WVU come out with the energy that it displayed in the three succeeding quarters.

“If we would have blitzed them early it would have had a different feel, but I’m not sure we could have gotten any more from it,” Kellogg said. “It’s good for us to get punched, as we like to say. In that first quarter, we didn’t have any rhythm and we fouled too much and JJ got in foul trouble again but found her way in the second half.

“Jordan Harrison was pretty good offensively in the first half to keep a little distance. Then, I thought we found our identity a little more in that third quarter with our pressure and turnovers. It looked more like us.”

In many ways, it was a meaningful opener, for Kellogg was able to get all his players in and 13 of them scored, giving the coach a good look at what he has to work with this season.

“We’re searching,” Kellogg admitted. “I don’t have them. I don’t know them yet. I told them before the game, when you get your call make your impact on the game in some capacity. I’m going to be searching for lineups for a bit. Just take advantage of the minutes you get. I don’t know if I learned a ton, but it’s OK. We’ll go back and watch it and learn from it.”

And make no doubt there is much to learn. The score was not an indicator of how WVU played.

“We have to play to a standard. We held them to 41 and a lot of our kids will think they played well defensively but we’ll show them that maybe we didn’t play as well as they thought,” Kellogg said.

“There’s work to be done, but a good start.”