Q&A: Penn State men’s basketball coach Micah Shrewsberry discusses his program
New Penn State men’s basketball coach Micah Shrewsberry was the inaugural guest on “The Lions’ Lair” — a new Penn State sports podcast by the Centre Daily Times. Shrewsberry discussed several key topics over the 24-minute interview, including recruiting, his family and his offensive style.
Here’s a transcription of the first eight minutes of the interview. You can find the rest of the interview by listening to “The Lions’ Lair” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts and all other major podcast platforms, as well as CentreDaily.com.
Q&A with Micah Shrewsberry
Centre Daily Times: We are joined by new Penn State men’s basketball coach Micah Shrewsberry. Micah, thanks for taking the time. How are you doing today?
Micah Shrewsberry: I’m doing great. And I appreciate you having me on. It’s an exciting time.
CDT: Yes, it is. And it’s a busy time, too. But we’ll get into some of that later with your thought process on recruiting and everything, but I want to take things back first, to when you were offered the job and when (taking this job) this sort of got into your mind.
What was your decision making process like when you got offered the job? And I know you’ve told people in the past that you got a lot of “No” before and you’ve said publicly, you’ve gotten a lot of “No” before? Was this something that you jumped on? What was the decision making process like for you accepting the Penn State position?
Shrewsberry: Yeah this was an attractive job for me for a lot of reasons. So I didn’t have to have much thought into it. I was fired up from from Day 1 of being a part of this process. So when it was offered me, I was on board right away, I had to make sure my wife and my family was on board but they were. And so it was fun. I’ve grown up in the heart of Big 10 country.
I’ve been a part of Big 10 basketball. Big 10 basketball has been my whole life of what I’ve watched, so having the chance to get an opportunity to coach in this league is special. And it was just something that I couldn’t pass up. To do it in the Big 10 and to do it at a school with great academics, it’s a priority to our administration, that stood out to me as well, because those are the kind of kids that I’ve tried to recruit in the different programs that I’ve been to. This was a great fit for me.
CDT: For the fan base in the past, commitment to basketball, and men’s basketball specifically, has been a sticking point. The level of investment, the level of time — and clearly hiring someone of your caliber is some level of investment in itself — but how do you feel about the university’s commitment to you, your staff, and what you want to do moving forward?
Shrewsberry: You could feel how genuine, the administration was right from the start. Being able to connect with everybody that I talked to, no matter if it was (athletic director) Sandy (Barbour), or (deputy director of athletics) Lynn (Holleran), or (deputy director of athletics) Scott Sidwell, or anybody that was on the committee, President (Eric) Barron, they were all comforting and that’s the most important thing.
You have to have a partnership at the top in terms of who you’re talking to, in terms of who you’re working with, in terms of your every day process. Now, I think that was important for me, the level of commitment, I wanted them to invest in people and I think we’ve done that. That’s how you really get some buy-in. When you can give 100% attention to your guys in a lot of different ways and I think they’ve proven that, and we’ll prove it as a staff in terms of the investment that we’re putting into this program.
CDT: Onto roster construction and less, grand scheme things. The transfer portal is getting more and more complex every year, obviously, with the one-time transfer rule and everything. How do you view it within the scope of roster building? And how can it accelerate a timeline?
Usually, when someone comes in for a new job, it’s like, “OK, I’ve gotta get my guys in this initial recruiting class, the high school recruiting class, and then I move forward and get them in place.” How does it sort of accelerate your timeline and your goals for what you want to accomplish?
Shrewsberry: It really can change things for, not just me coming in here, it can change things for any team in America. You can go from good to bad or you can go from bad to good in a hurry with the transfer portal. Some of it you don’t have any control over and some of it you do have control over. So right away, it was important. “How do we build our culture, how do we build what we want to do here?”
You’re judged by the people that you get, not by the people that you don’t get. The guys that we’re recruiting, the guys that we want to bring in here, we have an opportunity now to get more of those guys quicker because of the transfer portal. You don’t want to almost live and die by the transfer portal either. There’s some people that have a lot of success doing it, I don’t feel comfortable doing that each and every year.
I want to build this thing, and take the time to build it and build our culture, bring in recruits that value Penn State, that value the education here, that value the development that we’re going to do as a program. So we’re going to still recruit high school kids. We can use transfers to fill specific needs. I think that’s where you’ll see us kind of delve into it a lot more. Obviously, this year is a little bit different. Our needs were players, so that’s how we filled it. But it’ll be more specific in how we do it approaching later on in this tenure.
CDT: And so you mentioned building the culture and everything. How do you help a group coalesce that you don’t know the whole roster all that well. You have new guys that don’t really know you or the roster that well, and you have the guys that have been here before, but that isn’t a massive part of the roster anymore after some turnover.
How do you get a group like that to coalesce and make sure everyone’s on the same page when they’re three groups of people who aren’t that familiar with each other?
Shrewsberry: Yeah, you’re right. We have a lot of new pieces, we have a lot of moving pieces. I mean, we’re doing things where our staff is still learning each other. Like we haven’t all worked together. Everything is new, everything’s exciting, everything’s changing. But trying to get everybody on the same page, this summer is huge for us, these eight weeks that we get this summer.
And not just on the basketball court. What we’re doing off the court, like how we’re interacting with each other, each and every day, getting the goals of who we want to be individually and who we want to be as a team. And that’s how you build the right foundation, I think getting a guy like John (Harrar) to come back was really important for us. Because he embodies Penn State, what this place is, and what it can do for you. He’s somebody that helps us set the tone with how he plays.
Having other guys that were committed from Day 1, like a Sam Sessoms or a Myles Dread, having guys like that, who are committed to the cause of staying here. That’s really important. They can help us push our message in the right way, just by investing the time.
I talked about investing in people, that’s what we do here. We’re going to spend time with these guys, we’re going to invest in them. I’m going to give everything I have to these guys this year. We had our first team meeting, which is crazy, it’s June, and I had the first opportunity to sit down in front of everybody who’s here. And I told them we can accomplish whatever we want to accomplish, I’m not going to put a ceiling on what we can accomplish. And we’re not gonna let outside expectations tell us what we can accomplish. The one benefit of the transfer portal is we also have an older group of guys.
And sometimes when you see that winning becomes one of the most important things. So when you have that, you have veterans that have been around college basketball, guys that have played a lot of basketball games, they understand that winning helps everybody.
