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Inside how Notre Dame hired Penn State's Micah Shrewsberry to succeed Mike Brey as Irish basketball coach – CBS Sports
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NORTH AUGUSTA, S.C. — Tucked in the far corner of Gymnasium 2, Micah Shrewsberry scouts with a smile on his face and a navy blue Notre Dame cap on his head. A few months into his new job, the man they call “Shrews” also dons a green Fighting Irish T-shirt, the Leprechaun logo proudly putting up its dukes.
Shrewsberry’s at Peach Jam, evaluating his first recruiting class for Notre Dame. It’s been a rapid ascent for the 46-year-old Indiana native. In March he coached Penn State to a 17-point NCAA Tournament victory over Texas A&M — PSU’s first March Madness win in 22 years. After just two years there, Shrewsberry was plucked by Notre Dame.
Prior to that, Shrewsberry was a longtime assistant, serving two stints at Purdue under Matt Painter. He sandwiched those tenures between a six-year run with the Boston Celtics, working for Brad Stevens. Shrews paid his dues for two decades. His only prior head coaching experience came in 2005-07, when he ran IU South Bend’s men’s basketball program. That spell in NAIA would help his cause getting to Notre Dame 16 years later.
There’s a big mission ahead. Notre Dame is a quality job but the program has dipped. The Irish had one NCAA Tournament-level team in Mike Brey’s final six seasons. With the right coach, this can be a viable year-over-year program, nationally.
There’s also the exercise of supplanting Brey (now an assistant with the Atlanta Hawks), who was a beloved guy and perhaps the most affable coach in the sport. He lasted 23 seasons, went to 13 NCAA tourneys and won 483 games, making him the longest-tenured and winningest coach in program history.
“Mike was such a strong public presence,” Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick said. “He was a guy who would routinely go into the residence halls and talk to the kids, or the dining hall, and encouraged people to come to the games. He was among the top coaches in the country raising money for Coaches vs. Cancer. Mike represented Notre Dame extremely well.”
There is no replacing his character and charm.
“I don’t feel like I’m filling the shoes, just because we are so different in how we go about things,” Shrewsberry said. “I’ve seen him have really good teams and competed against him and watched him. He’s got a little bit of a blueprint of how you can have success here. You’ve got to take some parts of that. What did his best teams look like? How can you get to that in your own way?”
Shrewsberry is also the first Black head coach in Notre Dame men’s basketball history.
Unlike most other power-conference schools in the past 10-15 years, Notre Dame hasn’t gone through a coaching change or three as of late. When Brey stepped down, the only longer-tenured coaches at high-major programs were Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim (now retired), Michigan State’s Tom Izzo and Gonzaga’s Mark Few.
Did Notre Dame just land its coach for the next two decades? Swarbrick sure hopes so.
“There really was something compelling about somebody whose first head job was IU South Bend,” Swarbrick said.
Stability is hard to come by these days at the most competitive and lucrative levels of Division I. Jobs like Notre Dame are desperately coveted. Why was Shrewsberry the guy? This is how it happened.
January 18: Brey finally breaks.
A 13-point home loss to 6-13 Florida State drops ND below .500 (9-10) for the first time and puts the team in the ACC basement. The next morning, Brey walks into Swarbrick’s office and says the program needs a new voice and he’ll be stepping down at season’s end. This doesn’t catch Swarbrick by surprise. They talked occasionally in the prior two years about how much longer Brey would stay on.
“I made clear that he was welcome to be Notre Dame’s coach as long as I was the AD,” he said.
Swarbrick, who on June 8 announced he would step down as AD in 2024, told CBS Sports he had not yet made a decision on his own end date when Brey determined his. On Jan. 19, Notre Dame announced a new coach was coming in the spring. Swarbrick quickly got to work on a successor. He opted not to hire a search firm (sparing the school roughly $75,000). Instead, the process involved five trusted Notre Dame athletic department employees.
For as much pressure as there was to hire a men’s basketball coach, Swarbrick basked in his one and only opportunity to do so. This was to be his 28th (and likely final) head-coaching hire. He began by calling three shoot-for-the-moon candidates, who all said no. So, Notre Dame took two weeks to build out a list that bloated to 80 conceivable candidates. Those people were screened against 10 criteria for the job:
That candidate list lingered until a grueling meeting on Feb. 3 sliced it to approximately 15.
“Then we vet those individuals much more carefully,” Swarbrick said. “It was important to know that, philosophically, we were aligned in terms of college athletics and its purpose and how to operate it, but equally important was recognizing that massive change was on the horizon. Is this a person who could figure out how to navigate an incredibly dynamic landscape?”
By mid-February, copious background calls on Shrewsberry put him as the favorite. Swarbrick had multiple conversations with (among many others) Matt Painter, Brad Stevens, and even in-house with Notre Dame women’s basketball coach Niele Ivey. (Shrewsberry coached her son, Jaden, at Purdue). Shrews would never lose his lead. Over the next month, every time Swarbrick’s confidants re-ranked against criteria with additional information gathered, he was always at the top.
Back at Penn State, Shrews was clueless.
“Didn’t even want to talk about it. He’s so one-track. He shuts it down,” his wife, Molly, said. “I, of course, am like, could this be a possibility? Notre Dame is amazing, going back home. He literally would be like, ‘I’m trying to focus on my team and focus on the next game.’ He would not engage me at all.”
On Feb. 21, the list was cleaved to eight. Calls went out to agents to set up talks over Zoom. Shrewsberry had little choice but to briefly engage. These Zoom calls weren’t so much interviews as they were informal how-do-you-dos. Swarbrick wanted face-to-face interaction (even if over a screen) before advancing to the next big stage of the search.
“My approach was to be clear that I wouldn’t talk to them again until their season was over,” he said. “Because I wouldn’t want somebody talking to my coach during the season. I just needed one preliminary call to know if there was interest.”
Something that speaks to the appeal of the Notre Dame job and the reality of high-stakes job searches in college sports: Swarbrick said all eight candidates agreed to speak with him. (Sources previously told CBS Sports all those candidates were sitting head coaches.)
“For us to take the next step, that was going to be important: to have somebody who could articulate why they wanted to be Notre Dame’s coach,” Swarbrick said. “Really important. You’d be surprised how many people can’t do that when they think they want to work for you, but they aren’t able to answer that question.”
Notre Dame is a good job but a tough job and a different place from most other power-conference hoops gigs. Looking back, it would have been easy for Shrewsberry to lose his lead. Reason 1: Penn State lost four straight games to start February, was 5-9 in the Big Ten and not a projected NCAA Tournament team. As Shrewsberry joked to me, “I’m not so sure how good of a coach I was then.”
The skid didn’t dissuade Swarbrick.
Reason 2: On Feb. 26, the day before Shrewsberry took the meeting with Swarbrick, Penn State blew a 19-point lead at home and fell to Rutgers 59-56. Shrewsberry fumed more that night than any other last season. After home games, he normally stays at the office for a few hours to watch tape and soak in the result (win or lose) before turning off Coach Mode and going home. That night, he didn’t leave the facility until close to 4 a.m. A big cardboard box that had once housed a traveling suitcase was mutilated.
“That poor box got absolutely destroyed that night,” Shrewsberry said. “I probably kicked that thing 200 times.”
The next day, Shrewsberry didn’t bail on the call. The 45-minute chat was, for the most part, not about basketball.
“I’m talking to a guy after his team had just had a horrible experience,” Swarbrick said. “I’m a big believer in you learn more about coaches in those circumstances than when they’ve had great success, and to hear him talk about how he handled it, what his message to his team was, was really compelling.”
Shrewsberry was as casual as ever. He didn’t pitch himself at all. If anything, he was somewhat preoccupied with switching a ball-screen coverage from what he’d been running the entire season.
“I didn’t even know if this was a due diligence conversation or if this was serious,” Shrewsberry said. “I had no idea where I stood, if this was even going to happen. And at the same time, I’m such a sore loser, I can’t get my mind off: Dammit, I can’t believe we lost a 19-point lead.”
He made the tweaks and Penn State went 6-2 the rest of the way.
As for the Zoom, Molly said her husband was visibly excited with how it went and intrigued about how much potential there was for Notre Dame to recruit itself. (Penn State, conversely, has minimal men’s hoops tradition and ranks at the bottom of Big Ten basketball facilities.) Shrewsberry was enticed by the notion that Notre Dame isn’t geographically tied to a recruiting footprint. He grew up, played and coached in Indiana for the first 37 years of his life. He was organically tied to the state and knew as much about basketball in Indiana as any other coach vetted.
It was a humongous advantage for his candidacy.
In early March, a run to the Big Ten Tournament championship game sealed Penn State’s tournament credentials (and further solidified Shrewsberry’s appeal for Swabrick), vaulting the program to the Big Dance for the first time since 2011. Here’s the wrinkle. In the preceding months, Shrewsberry’s agent attempted to negotiate a new contract with new Penn State AD Pat Kraft (who did not hire Shrewsberry). The school decided to wait … until Penn State’s March surge accelerated matters, so much so that Shrewsberry was approached by Kraft on March 14, just hours before the team was flying to the NCAA Tournament.
Voilà: A restructured contract had been drafted and approved. All it needed was his signature. Shrewsberry was thrown; he had no idea this was even happening behind the scenes and was uncomfortable with signing a contract and having the school announce it publicly the day of Penn State’s NCAA Tournament game against Texas A&M. He didn’t sign it.
“I’ve always operated like I’m broke, so money wasn’t an issue,” Shrewsberry said. “I didn’t really care. Years and security, that part’s pretty important. I want to be able to take care of my kids for a long time.”
The Nittany Lions’ season ended two months to the day from Brey walking into Swarbrick’s office. On March 18, PSU fell to Texas in the second round. After largely living with blinders on for months, it was finally time. Molly couldn’t be at the game that night (their daughter had a gymnastics meet), so Micah called her when he got back to the hotel, approximately 45 minutes before getting on the bus for the airport.
Even then, he says, he was reticent about engaging in job talk.
“I have a hard time moving on from shit,” Shrewsberry said of the loss to Texas. “I also know there’s a lot of stuff that’s about to happen, there’s a lot of other things about to happen with our guys. I want to talk with them. I need to schedule meetings with them.”
Doesn’t matter. Molly tells him it’s time. Notre Dame is extremely interested in having a conversation ASAP. Providence’s AD wants to talk to him. Penn State was pushing hard.
“Unfortunately, they waited very long to push,” Molly said.
Had Penn State come in January with a contract extension, Shrewsberry is almost certainly still coaching there. There were also rumors about whether Shrewsberry would be Georgetown’s choice if Ed Cooley didn’t take that job.
“Neither he nor his agent ever played that game,” Swarbrick said. “I think there was a very strong desire by Penn State to retain him. And they were being appropriately very aggressive. And I think at the end of the day, it was much more about: Would he stay there with his guys? Did he really want to come to Notre Dame? No one who knew him well thought Georgetown was a real option.”
Shrewsberry didn’t wind up talking to any school representatives that night. He wanted to get home, sleep on it and talk with his wife in the morning.
But then?
Penn State’s plane had a mechanical issue that kept it grounded in Des Moines, Iowa, for hours. Shrewsberry sat on the runway, a thousand thoughts churning in his brain. It was near dawn on Sunday before he pulled into his driveway.
“Gassed, man,” he remembers. “Gassed.”
Notre Dame was effectively down to two candidates by this stage and had an encouraging signal from its No. 2 that it would be a yes if Shrewsberry was a no. Penn State put seven years and nearly $26 million on the table for Shrewsberry. Amid a whirlwind of a Monday, Swarbrick convinced Shrewsberry to agree to meet the next day — 150 miles away. Shrewsberry told Kraft he was going to meet with Notre Dame and that he’d have a decision soon.
Swarbrick and Notre Dame president Rev. John Jenkins flew on a private plane to meet Micah and Molly at the Pittsburgh Airport Marriott.
“I think he clearly understood he was our preferred candidate,” Swarbrick said. “But at the same time, I made it very clear that this isn’t a pro forma interview. If Father Jenkins reaches a different conclusion, you’re not the guy. Father John really has to come away convinced that we found the right person.”
Did he ever. Shrewsberry didn’t even prep. He showed up in a suit and tie, but was otherwise entirely himself and essentially riffed from the heart.
“It was a pretty laid back and casual meeting, that’s just how I operate,” Shrewsberry said. “There’s not many things that stress me out, losses aside.”
Swarbrick isn’t keen on elaborate or ornamented presentations that can come with a coaching search. By this point, he’d consulted with numerous program alumni and a network of people across the basketball industry. Shrewsberry passed in that regard before ever being interviewed. The in-person portion was the big test of his potential as a steward of Notre Dame and having the right answers about how to coach. Simply put: Does he fit?
They got deep into his history with Indiana, and it didn’t take long for everything to feel right.
“I was talking to a guy whose first head coaching job was at IU South Bend,” Swarbrick said. “He drove by campus every day on his way home. Everything about him connected to Indiana, from high school to college to coaching with Painter and Brad Stevens. He was especially able to understand Notre Dame. He said, ‘I want to be back in Indiana.'”
For as cool as he can play things off, Shrewsberry had clear zeal for the job, which became more pronounced as the meeting went on.
“It was more of a conversation,” Molly said. “It didn’t feel like an interview. Nothing felt intimidating. It felt good. Some job interviews are scary. This was not one of them.”
Shrewsberry left believing the job was his. Finally, on their two-hour drive back, he and Molly had their first in-depth conversation about the prospect of leaving Penn State. He recalled devil’s-advocate discussions Painter and Stevens had with him, just to make sure he was balancing all the information.
“His influences were so compelling, the people who were both speaking for him, vouching for him, but who had been his mentors, and it’s just such an impressive group,” Swarbrick said.
The official offer came in on Tuesday night. Shrewsberry finally clued his children into the situation, and they had a say in the matter. (His oldest, Braden, was set to play at Penn State. He’ll suit up at Notre Dame next season.)
“Moving is very hard and we hadn’t been there very long and the kids were all happy,” Molly said. “The logistics were hard for me to get out of to think about the big picture. At first I could not imagine moving, finding new schools and the transition part. Even toward the end I was like, I don’t know if I could do it. There were a lot of things we liked about Penn State, but when you step out of the box and into the big picture back home, it’s Notre Dame.”
Sometimes the small stuff can be the clincher. In Happy Valley, the Shrewsberrys laid down a basketball court in their backyard shortly after moving there in 2021. A neighbor was a pest about it. She’d yell across the yard to Braden and his brother Nick, “You’re not going to the NBA! Give it up already!” She’d complain about the noise in the middle of the afternoon. One night, Molly came home at 7:30 p.m. to discover two policemen in her driveway.
This neighbor had called the cops on the boys for playing basketball too loudly.
Hard to envision anything so absurd happening in basketball-obsessed Indiana.
“That sums it up,” Molly said. “It’s so different. Coming back here, it’s a different culture and a different experience. When you follow your intuition, it’s not that big of a decision.”
Shrewsberry’s been grinding as a coach for 20-plus years, but the past few months have been a new gear. He recruited on the road or on campus for every day allowable in April and May. Notre Dame isn’t going to be a transfer-heavy destination, but he did bring in three players, all of whom he had pre-existing relationships with.
Shrewsberry was also a coach for USA Basketball’s U19 camp in Colorado Springs, Colorado, earlier this summer.
“There’s never a complete day off,” he said.
After living out of a suitcase since late March, he and Molly finally closed on a house earlier this week.
Back at the Peach Jam, Shrewsberry is eying one of the 20-plus 2025 prospects ND’s staff is monitoring. The real chase is with 2024. He’s already landed one commitment (shooting guard Cole Certa, a top-100 player and native of Bloomington) and has four other primary targets. Most coaches in his position would be spreading a wider net.
“It’s a dangerous game to play,” he says with a chuckle. “But if you really believe who these kids are and spend time with them, it’s like, that kid fits. I’m going to go all-out and try to get him.”
Coaches often say Year 1 is tough, but Year 2 is the toughest. Shrewsberry has to have one eye on the present and the other on the future. He’s trying to form a roster that can be, hopefully at worst, middle-of-the-pack in the ACC in Year 1. Notre Dame is a good gig because many of its recruits either want to be targeted by a program like that, or their parents are especially eager to have them go there. It’s not a school that’s easy for transfers.
“For us, it’s people who appreciate Notre Dame for what it is, the academics of it, but also I’m a basketball coach, I want dudes that love basketball, who say, ‘I can be good in both things. I can be a good student but I want to go play in the NBA,” Shrewsberry said. “It’s hard to find that in a two-week transfer portal window. Coaches can fool kids and kids can fool coaches. It’s hard to fool somebody in a long recruitment.”
Brey may well have coined the “get old, stay old” credo, and there’s a good reason for it. Even with some one-and-done talent coming through the program over the years, Notre Dame’s best chance at being a force on a national level will rely upon player development and starting juniors and seniors. Balancing scholarships and classes is huge, and Shrews has an old-school approach in this regard.
He’ll have 10 players on scholarship next season, three shy of the limit. Shrewsberry’s not concerned about the number because he doesn’t want the scholarships tied up for the future.
“Kids aren’t really leaving Notre Dame,” he said. “You can’t miss in recruiting. They’re yours for four years. I’m not a run-people-off guy. It’s my mistake if they’re not there. Kids are going to stay. They appreciate the academics and everything else. You’ve got to get the right ones.”
Swarbrick believes he got the right one. Shrewsberry was never a glitzy name, just the right fit. Look at his Indiana-bred mentors: Painter has been at Purdue for two decades and will likely retire there. The only job that got Stevens to leave Butler was the Boston Freaking Celtics. Shrewsberry is of that mold.
This is where he wants to build out a long-lasting coaching legacy.
“I’m a defensive guy at heart,” Shrewsberry said. “Defense and toughness is what I’ll try to hang my hat on. Maybe I have spent so much time with Brad that I’ve morphed into a version of him. If you ever asked people who have worked with him, he’s a defensive guy but we figured out how to be good on offense through what’s really hard to guard, what’s really hard to stop. I’m not married to one style or one way of doing things. I’m going to do what works. Sometimes it will work on Wednesday but it won’t work on Saturday, so I’ll do something different on Saturday.”
Flexibility is paramount. Don’t be locked into one mode. He’ll bring that mantra to Notre Dame — a place that probably needs it.
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