MORGANTOWN — His nickname back in the day was “The Magician,” which was handed to Kerr Kriisa by his former WVU men’s basketball teammates.
There isn’t enough magic in the world that can seemingly make Kriisa’s current troubles disappear.
The college basketball journeyman who spent the 2023-24 season with the Mountaineers, was arrested by the FBI earlier this week in Lexington, Ky. and was indicted on charges of allegedly carrying out a four-year scheme to obtain nearly $2.2 million from multiple victims using false representations.
Among the allegations, Kriisa apparently used an alias of “Irene” in attempting to defraud victims of their money. He also allegedly convinced one victim to send him money by saying his mother had cancer and needed treatment.
The best part of the story, once the walls of the schemes had begun to crumble around him, Kriisa apparently told one of his victims, in November 2022, that he would sell one of his organs to repay said victim.
At WVU, you may remember, Kriisa was suspended for the first nine games of the 2023-24 season due to an NCAA suspension for receiving illegal benefits. What we’ve heard over the years – confirmed off the record, so believe it at your own risk – is that Kriisa defrauded an Arizona fan by selling the fan his ticket allotment to Wildcats’ games prior to transferring to WVU.
With the Mountaineers, Kriisa’s best moment may have been showing up to a postgame press conference sporting a white fur coat, quite possibly the greatest single vision ever created by the NIL era of college athletics.
It could have only been topped if Kriisa also wore a fedora hat, a dangling gold earring and a “Born to be Gangsta” t-shirt.
If you want to stay on the court, Kriisa’s best WVU moment probably was his 3-point shooting display during that preseason’s Mountaineer Madness, in which he banged in 10 of his first 11 attempts. In winning the finals, he connected on 24 3-pointers over 60 seconds.
We refer to Kriisa as a journeyman, because after his time at Arizona and WVU, the point guard continued to follow the transfer portal money to Kentucky and then to Cincinnati, where he finally used up his college eligibility last season.
The search for money, it has become obvious, was far more important to Kriisa than the game of basketball ever was.
Now, we can sit here and criticize the WVU men’s basketball program for signing Kriisa in the first place, as a sort of why-didn’t-you-do-your-homework type of lesson.
The truth is Kriisa was already on WVU’s campus and enrolled before the impermissible benefits came to light in August 2023.
According to the indictment handed down by the Department of Justice, Kriisa’s fraudulent schemes were already in play before he ever transferred to WVU.
How was WVU to uncover all of that back in 2023? Short of hiring some hacker to break into Kriisa’s personal email account and text messages – pretty sure that’s illegal – no school college hoops program would have been able to uncover that type of twisted tale.
Unless the kid just came out and admitted it, there was no way for Bob Huggins – WVU’s head coach at the time of Kriisa’s enrollment – or Josh Eilert – who ended up coaching Kriisa at WVU – to ever know of what Kriisa was allegedly doing in his spare time.
“Um, coach Huggins, just wanted to let you know that I also pose as someone named Irene to defraud people out of money.” I’m guessing Kriisa never let that slip in his one season with the Mountaineers.
What schools can uncover, though, is character. You don’t have to be a college hoops coach, a policeman or a private investigator to learn if someone has outstanding character, average character or is just plain a bad person.
It’s not hard to decipher if an athlete is simply looking for greener pastures in the NIL game or if they actually want to make a positive impact on the program and its fans.
Kriisa had no interest in the values that come with signing up to play basketball at WVU, that was obvious. At least it should have been obvious. It certainly was that night Kriisa came out sporting the Joe Namath look. WVU signed him anyway. So did Kentucky. So did Cincinnati.
Those involved in those signings should be ashamed today. There were three opportunities to live by the words coaches often speak of, that character means just as much as ability, and all three failed to even come close to living up to those words.
