MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Former Mountaineers basketball player Joe Fryz has died following a battle with ALS. He was 58.
Fryz, a standout player at Moon High School in Pittsburgh from 1973-76, averaged 27 points per game as a senior and was named all-state in Pennsylvania. Recruited by a number of major college programs including Maryland, Duke and Oklahoma State, Fryz said he chose WVU because it was close to home.
He was a high school teammate of Kentucky coach John Calipari and a college teammate of current Mountaineers coach Bob Huggins. The three remained lifelong friends.
A 6-foot-2 guard, Fryz played two seasons under Joedy Gardner before Gale Catlett took over as coach. Fryz averaged 7.1 points over a 104-game career at WVU, including 10.7 as a senior when he became a team captain.
Fryz scored 13 points on March 2, 1978, when the Mountaineers upset top-seeded Rutgers 81-74 at the Eastern Eight tournament in Pittsburgh.
After graduating from West Virginia with a degree in business administration in 1980, he launched a commercial real estate company in Pittsburgh.
He was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2014, a condition that soon confined him to a wheelchair. Yet he continued to visit basketball practices at Cornell High School where he was a volunteer assistant. In January he was inducted into the Pittsburgh Basketball Club hall of fame.
Along with Linda, his wife of 25 years, Fryz is survived by a sister, Debbie Wise, of Morgantown.