Micah Shrewsberry Era Begins For Notre Dame Men's Basketball
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A new era is officially underway for Notre Dame men’s basketball. In a setting that was a near carbon copy of the one where Marcus Freeman was introduced as head football coach roughly 15 months ago, Micah Shrewsberry was introduced as the new front man for the Fighting Irish men’s team Thursday afternoon inside Purcell Pavilion.
Just like Freeman did in his introduction inside the Irish Athletic Center in December, 2021, Shrewsberry walked out of the Purcell Pavilion tunnel with his family walking in with him.
Former Irish basketball standout Jordan Cornette was the MC of the event. He called Shrewsberry, who spent the last two seasons as Penn State’s head coach, “a tactician, a savant and a skilled leader of the locker room”.
Shrewsberry wasted no time in his opening statements setting the bar high for a program that has been to the NCAA Tournament just once in the last five seasons the tournament has been played.
“I truly believe this, you can win the national championship here,” Shrewsberry said to a crowd of fans, fellow Irish coaches and staff and media. “You can win a national championship here and that's what we're going to do. That's what we're going to fight for every single day.”
The 46-year-old who was born and raised in the Indianapolis area began his coaching career at Division III Wabash College and worked his way through stops at Indiana University-South Bend, Butler, Purdue and the Boston Celtics (among others) before landing his first Divison One head coaching job at Penn State, but he’s a self-proclaimed life-long Notre Dame fan.
“It's pursuing excellence,” Shrewsberry said of Notre Dame. “But there's a history of pursuing excellence here. And that's individually and that's as a team. And I love being able to look up there and see the success that's happened here. And I just want to follow up on it right there. There's great people that have done great, things, great coaches. And they've laid the blueprint of how can you have success here. You don't need to rewrite the book. You can have success by doing it how other people did it. Now I just have to do it in my own way.”
Shrewsberry referenced Freeman as well as Irish women’s coach Niele Ivey and their programs multiple times during his time at the podium as the two coaches looked on. He even mentioned the Irish fencing team winning another national championship and joked that he was recruiting Ivey’s top incoming 2023 recruit, Hannah Hidalgo, who was the MVP of the McDonald’s All-American game this week.
Irish athletic director Jack Swarbrick has now hired head coaches in 22 of Notre Dame’s 26 sports after hiring Shrewsberry. He has now filled the three highest profile of those positions – football and men’s and women’s basketball – in the past 36 months.
“Micah fits Notre Dame,” Swarbrick said of Shrewsberry. “In a sense, he's been on a career long journey. Some might say a lifelong journey, much of it spent in Indiana, that makes his arrival here today feel almost preordained.”
The top priority for the new men’s coach is rebuilding a roster that loses six graduate players and will lose at least two players to the transfer portal. Shrewsberry’s son Braeden decommitted from Penn State last week and will play for his dad as a freshman next season. There are plenty more roster spots to be filled by players who Shrewsberry says will be happy to be at Notre Dame.
“Once we find those guys, we're going to find the right fits,” Shrewsberry said. “I'm not going to skip steps to build a roster. I'm not going to skip steps. I have a vision for the present and a vision for the future. But they have to be fits for this place. They have to be fits for me. And that's what we're going to look to do.”
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