Micah Shrewsberry talks progress for Penn State basketball during NCAA Tournament push

Micah Shrewsberry would love for Penn State to make the NCAA tournament this season, but that’s not the end goal. The Nittany Lions head coach discussed the progress of the program but didn’t want to make it one singular goal.

Shrewsberry is only in Year 2 as head coach and Penn State certainly made progress from last year. The Nittany Lions went 14-17 last year but are 16-11 this year and could sneak into March Madness.

Shrewsberry opened up about that mindset on Sirius XM’s Big Ten Radio.

“I want to look at it in a couple of different ways, one like what are we doing as a program,” Shrewsberry said. “Are we taking the steps necessary to build? I don’t have a lot of patience. That’s probably one of the things that is a negative about me is, I don’t have patience, right? But sometimes I forget that this is only Year 2 of us, myself and our staff, of us being here and what we’re building. This is early in our tenure, and for us, you know, to be mentioned, and have a possibility to play in the postseason, it’s something that we want to do it the right way. 

“We don’t want to skip steps. We want to find the right guys and stay on this process. So, you know, I gotta remember that sometimes instead of looking at the endgame. This success as a team, we didn’t put goals in place to say this is what we want to reach, this is what we want to do. We wanted to see what was going to happen.”

By not making the NCAA Tournament the end goal, Shrewsberry made sure Penn State kept making progress for bigger aspirations.

“Be process oriented and let the results fall where they may, because I also didn’t want to put a ceiling on our team and say, ‘Let’s make postseason play,’” Shrewsberry said. “And then we get there and then we don’t have anything else to play for once we get there. Let’s do the best we can. Let’s do whatever we can to be successful. 

“And, you know, we’ll judge it by ourselves and maybe everybody is not happy with where we end up or what we do but as long as the guys in our locker room are happy and the guys in our office on staff are happy, I can live with what people have to say outside of those walls.”

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Penn State returns to action Thursday at Ohio State at 6:30 p.m. ET.