Micah Shrewsberry Preps For Fast Approaching First Season At Notre Dame

First-year Notre Dame men's basketball coach Micah Shrewsberry eyes the start of his first season with the Fighting Irish

Time has flown by for Micah Shrewsberry. Nearly seven months have passed since he was hired as Notre Dame men’s basketball coach and the start of his first season at the helm is fast approaching.

“I wish I had more time,” Shrewsberry said this week.

Shrewsberry overhauled the roster after being hired to replace the school’s all-time wins leader in March. He inherited just three scholarship players and one walk-on from Mike Brey’s last team that finished 11-21 after limping to the finish line by losing nine of its last 10 games.

Eight newcomers fill the Fighting Irish roster this season. The group includes three transfers and four incoming freshmen. Everything is a work in progress right now.

“You can see the improvement from day one to day two,” Shrewsberry explained. “You can see the improvement from week one to week two and now things change a little bit because we throw a curveball in and we start to prepare for somebody. It’s not necessarily to prepare for a team, it’s to show them how I like to prepare. How we should prepare as a group. How do you get ready for something, which is still about us and still learning about us. So, I don’t know. I like where we’re heading. I don’t coach effort and I don’t have to. I don’t have to say a word about effort to these guys because they are playing extremely hard and competing.”

Markus Burton, the only current freshman to commit prior to Shrewsberry’s hiring, is the only true point guard on the roster. He’ll be thrust into the fire early, with a mix of others pitching in.

Including the exhibition game against Hanover College, Shrewsberry has seven games in November to tinker and experiment with his lineup and rotations before ACC play begins on Dec. 2 with a trip to Miami.

“We’ve switched teams from day to day,” Shrewsberry remarked. “We’ve thrown different combinations together. We’ve played with different combinations. One, so they’re comfortable with each other. They’re comfortable knowing what each other...what they like to do. But also on the whim that (if) one guy is not playing the way he’s supposed to play, I got no problem sitting him down next to me and putting somebody else in there that’s just as capable. So, if you’re not getting the job done, you’re going to come have a seat. I’m big on discipline. I’m big on how we play.

“You have to earn your spot every single day with me,” he continued. “There is nobody sitting there, sitting happy and getting satisfied. If you don’t come and perform the next dude is taking your spot if you don’t play the right way. You have to have that competition and that's what we’ve been about really this whole fall, this whole preseason.”

There is more size on the roster than the Irish had last year. Kebba Njie, who followed Shrewsberry to South Bend from Penn State, and freshman Carey Booth are both 6-10. Seton Hall transfer Tae Davis and senior returnee Matt Zona are both 6-9. They should combine to give the Irish more front court depth than they have had the last couple years.

The great unknown awaits Shrewsberry’s first team. The 47-year-old was 14-17 with a 10th place finish in the Big Ten in his first season at Penn State. That turned into a 23-14 record and an NCAA bid last season in year two.

It’s hard to anticipate what to expect from this season, but Shrewsberry has his own standards to set along the way.

“I want to set the culture of how this program’s going to look in the future and what happens from there happens from there,” Shrewsberry explained. “We’re getting ready to play a scrimmage and I’m preparing like it’s the national championship game. So, no matter if it’s Niagara, Auburn (or) Duke, they all get the same preparation from me and our team. I want us to focus in that same exact way. There’s nobody that’s above us, there’s nobody that’s beneath us. They all require the same effort and energy to win and no matter if it’s day one or if it’s the national championship game, that’s the way we’re going to prepare every single game that we play. When you do that, when you focus on daily improvement, when you focus on that kind of focus level and detail level, then you see improvements. That’s all I want from our guys. I want to see improvement every single day. If we’re doing that, we’re playing our best basketball.

He has only been a Division One head coach for two years and his teams are 5-2 in conference tournaments in those two seasons. They went 2-1 with a trip to the Big Ten quarterfinals in 2022 and followed that by going 3-1 with wins over the 7, 2 and 3 seeds to reach the Big Ten Championship Game last year. They lost to No. 1 seed Purdue 67-65 in the title game.

“We’re playing our best ball at the end of the year and we’re clicking,” Shrewsberry said of the macro goal for his first Irish team. “That’s what I want this team to be doing.”

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