Micah Shrewsberry sets the tone for a new era of Penn State men’s basketball with win over Youngstown State
Micah Shrewsberry gave his postgame speech to his players Wednesday night with an self-admitted lack of awareness. The Penn State men’s basketball head coach had just won his first game of his career, a 75-59 victory over the Youngstown State Penguins to open the season.
Around him, as he spoke, stood his roster — armed with water bottles.
“In the locker room, they were great,” Shrewsberry said with a smile. “I kind of put it on me, I had some bad self-awareness. I didn’t realize each guy had two bottles of water in his hand waiting on me after I finish talking.”
His speech concluded and they pounced, drenching him with water in celebration of his first career victory, one that came 13 years after he took his first job as a Division 1 assistant coach.
The victory may have been the first, but it could be one of many as Shrewsberry sets the tone for a new era of Penn State men’s basketball.
The day leading up to his first win was not one that included much rest. The head coach said he struggled to sleep the night before, heading to his basement to play the arcade game Galaga to pass the time.
“It was a long day, that’s what it was,” Shrewsberry said. “...I couldn’t sleep. I was up for awhile. ... I was up early, I couldn’t nap after shootaround. I was just anxious to start. A lot of that was nervousness.”
Despite the lack of rest heading into the 8:30 p.m. tipoff, very little went wrong in the way of preparation for a moment that was years in the making for Shrewsberry.
And there was plenty of reason for things to go wrong. Over half of the roster was new to the team, with an entirely new coaching staff that had very little on-the-job experience with each other prior to Wednesday night’s season opener.
Still, Shrewsberry leaned on those assistants and those players to ensure he was ready to make his head coaching debut, even though he said there was some nervous energy prior to the game.
“Our staff has never gone through this together,” he said. “I bounce off ideas off (director of player development) Mike Green of things we did at Butler in practice and day of games. (Video coordinator) Grady Eifert was with me for my last two years at Purdue, so I bounce off ideas off of him about things that we should do at shootaround. Then the other assistants, we want to take all of that in and give our guys the best chance to be prepared to win.
“...(The players) were excited to play. You could sense a little bit of energy. We were a little quiet at shootaround, which, they’re normally not a quiet group. ... They were a little quiet. You could sense the kind of nervous energy.”
Plenty of preparation went into the season and the coaching staff had more than enough time to understand the team it had at its fingertips, but things can change when they take the court for the first time in game action that counts.
There’s always more to learn about players, coaches and teams as a season moves along and the opener was no different for Shrewsberry, although it reaffirmed plenty of what he expected.
“(I learned) a little bit of what I knew,” he said. “Those guys are just, they’re warriors, man.”
Learning about his team will help, but it’s much easier to learn positives than it is negatives, and the showing junior forward Seth Lundy had was very much a positive one. Lundy scored a game-high 23 points and pulled down six rebounds for good measure.
Though the spotlight could have easily been on the junior forward, he relished the opportunity to share in the big moment of his coach’s first career win.
“A lot people didn’t believe in us when everything happened last year,” Lundy said. “When he first got the job, a lot of guys transferred, nobody thought we were gonna be good and stuff like that. ... It was definitely special. The energy in the locker room was great. We all threw water on him. We celebrated his first win as a head coach. It was definitely a special moment for him and for us, too.”
The emotions of the game were evident in the postgame, with smiles abound. But those emotions can fade quickly if one win doesn’t turn into more. The easiest way to make that happen is by playing well each time the team takes the court.
It’s not a foregone conclusion that Penn State will be a great team this year, but senior guard Sam Sessoms believes it has a great leader, which is an awfully positive start.
“I honestly feel like Coach Shrews is a really good coach,” Sessoms said. “...The short amount of time I’ve spent with Coach Shrews, I’ve learned so much about the game in every aspect. I can feel his presence as a coach improving my game. To be a part of his first win is a great experience. I truly believe that he’s gonna make Penn State one of those schools, as far as basketball.
“I just got a lot of faith in him and the rest of the team does. To be a part of that, you can’t take that away. Later on this year, years after that, when we’re winning, doing thing like that. We are kind of like the foundation of it. You can’t take that away from us.”
This story was originally published November 11, 2021 at 2:40 AM with the headline "Micah Shrewsberry sets the tone for a new era of Penn State men’s basketball with win over Youngstown State."
