This WVU spirit stuff kind of grows on you — just ask Tim Eads, the university’s new Mountaineer mascot.
“I haven’t been clean-shaven since my sophomore year of high school,” laughed the bearded Eads, a Buffalo, Putnam County, native and public relations major who won the gig earlier this week.
Eads will be the 66th student to don the buckskins and wield the long rifle at WVU sporting events and other occasions.
He grew up a Mountaineers fan in the heart of Marshall Thundering Herd country.
“We were always coming up for football games,” he said Wednesday.
This fall, he’ll have the best vantage point of all on the sidelines of Mountaineer Field at Milan Puskar Stadium.
“To get to represent my school and my state is just an awesome thing,” he said/ Eads, it can be said, had his West Virginia bona fides long before the buckskins became part of his standard university apparel.
He’s used his writing and communications skills in volunteer projects at the Small Farm Center of the WVU Extension Service.
Eads has also volunteered at the Old Hemlock Foundation — which operates in Preseton County at the site of the Colonial cabin formerly occupied by the late George Bird Evans, a magazine illustrator and naturalist who moved from Manhattan to the Mountain State with is wife in the 1930s.
“Time caught th gestalt of this place pretty quick,” said LeJay Graffious, the foundation’s director.
“He was always organized, and he’s got this big personality. He’ll make a great Mountaineer.”
In that pursuit, Eads laughed again and said he wasn’t leaving a whisker of a chance on that score.
“Last year, I decided I was going try out,” he said. “The beard was just gonna grow.”
He’ll be even more official in April after the formal “Passing of the Rifle” ceremony at the WVU Alumni Center.