How Micah Shrewsberry is leaning on his team’s veterans to build a culture with Penn State men’s basketball
Micah Shrewsberry picked his cup up to take a drink at the Bryce Jordan Center with a grin across his face.
“That’s a bad memory,” he told the Centre Daily Times, grin still evident.
“They were dominating us.”
On Feb. 11, 2020, Penn State men’s basketball center John Harrar dove for the ball — as he always does — and slid toward the baseline in a game against Purdue, where Shrewsberry was the associate head coach in the game his team lost 88-76. The moment was an encapsulation of who Harrar is as a player.
With the Nittany Lions up 77-60 and a win over the Boilermakers well in hand, Harrar went skidding across the floor trying to prevent a loose ball from going out of bounds.
Fast forward just over a year and Shrewsberry was no longer foes with Harrar. Rather, he was trying to convince him to play for him after the former took over as Penn State’s head men’s basketball coach.
Now, seven months into Shrewsberry’s tenure, he and Harrar are two of the pillars of the culture the new head coach plans to build with a roster of seven newcomers to go with a brand new coaching staff.
By the time Shrewsberry arrived in State College to take over as the Penn State men’s basketball coach, seven of the 13 scholarship players from the 2020-21 season had entered the transfer portal. Leading scorer Myreon Jones and second-leading scorer Izaiah Brockington were in that group — with both ultimately leaving — but neither were the player Shrewsberry needed to keep most.
That title belonged to Harrar. He was the team’s leading rebounder and fourth-leading scorer, but more importantly he was the team’s heartbeat. Keeping him would mean keeping Penn State’s emotional leader.
“I’ve had a chance to coach against him, so he automatically had my respect long before I got here,” Shrewsberry said. “Then you get a chance to meet him, then you get a chance to talk to him and get to know him. You kind of get a feel for who he is as a person, what he’s done here as a student-athlete, but (also) what he’s done here as a friend, as a Penn Stater. He’s a guy that’s two feet in with Penn State.”
Shrewsberry managed to keep the senior center, along with junior Seth Lundy, who also entered the portal, among a group of six scholarship players who chose to return and play for the new Penn State head coach.
The newness of the staff isn’t just about the staff working with players they’ve never coached before. It’s also about learning to work with each other after the majority of the staff had never joined forces in their careers.
“There’s days where I’m doing a lot of teaching,” Shrewsberry said. “... That teaching starts before practice starts. Getting with our staff and doing more staff meetings and talking about how we want to teach things, the techniques that we want to do it. Basketball is taught a lot of different ways. ... They’re trying to get a feel for how I wanna do things, how I want to coach it. We’ve got some experienced coaches, they just haven’t done it the same way that I have or haven’t used the same terminology.”
Before Shrewsberry had even assembled that staff, he was working on getting Harrar back in the fold. The senior center had plenty of options when he entered the portal — and admitted he didn’t know how to answer when asked how close he was to leaving — but his decision to come back had a lot to do with the community he fell in love with and the first impression of the new coach.
Harrar was able to spend time with the Penn State coaches while he was in the portal, and ultimately that played a major role in convincing him to finish off his career where he started it.
“When I was in the portal, I was still able to see Coach Shrews in person,” Harrar told the CDT. “I was able to go meet with him and be around his staff. It was good energy, it was good people. He said he would look after me and he’s held up on that end of the bargain. He’s just a great dude.”
Harrar and Myles Dread are the only seniors on the roster who have spent their entire careers at Penn State, so it makes sense that the two have aided in the transition from the last regime’s way of doing things to the new one’s culture.
Both had strong relationships with former head coach Pat Chambers, who resigned just over a year ago following an internal investigation by the university, but both were also more than willing to give the new staff a chance and help build from the ground up with five new scholarship players added to the roster for the upcoming season.
“Adaptability is something that has always been important to me,” Dread told the CDT. “... I’m excited. I think that you look at everything with an open mind and you just find a new group of people to go to war with. I’m happy that I found this group, each and every one of them. I’m extremely proud to call them my teammates and I’m excited to go to war with them.”
While the support of the roster’s two veterans is important, it’s still on Shrewsberry and his staff to make things work. The first-time Division I head coach knows he will have to set the tone, but also already has a vision for what it takes to build.
“I think the first part of it is, you have to have a plan for how you do it,” he said. “You have to have a general idea of what you want it to be or what you want it to look like. ... Then you have to get buy-in from your players to go in that direction. It has to be meaningful to them.”
Cultures aren’t formed overnight and they surely aren’t formed when a third of the players are new faces for everyone involved.
Those new faces include four seniors — three of which could play major roles for the Nittany Lions. That could help the team build what it wants to be, even if plenty of those players won’t be in the program long enough to truly see it hit its stride. Nonetheless, it can be a start — a start that will carry into next season when the team’s returning players can indoctrinate the team’s five signees in the 2022 class into the culture.
That group will be the first one that could have a full career of Shrewsberry as a head coach and the culture it carries will have a major say in how the program is viewed.
For the time being, it’s on veterans like Harrar and Dread to help the head coach set the tone and make sure that, while the faces may change next year, the standard doesn’t.
Shrewsberry knows the importance of those players, and knows just how much it meant that Harrar never left.
“He’s a program builder. He’s a culture changer,” Shrewsberry said. “... He’s gonna help us long after he’s gone. His name will be synonymous with this place. I’ll make sure of that because of who he is. There’s film that will be shown to players long after this of him diving on loose balls, him fighting for offensive rebounds, him sprinting the floor as hard as possible to get back on transition defense. That’s gonna stick around forever. I’ll make sure he’s a guy that is always remembered because of that.”
Harrar’s name will always be synonymous with the program. His effort, the way he carries himself and his adaptability will forever connect him to Penn State men’s basketball and his tenure on campus.
With any luck for Shrewsberry, it will also be synonymous with the culture he’s built and the coach who broke the team’s decade-long absence from the NCAA Tournament.
