Notre Dame men’s basketball reportedly set to hire Micah Shrewsberry as next head coach
Micah Shrewsberry’s first college head coaching job was in South Bend. He’s returning 16 years after he left, and this time, it’s for the biggest basketball stage the area can offer: Notre Dame.
Shrewsberry, Penn State’s head coach the last two seasons, is set to take the same job at Notre Dame, according to multiple reports. The news was first reported by ESPN. The 46-year-old Indianapolis native just guided the Nittany Lions to their first NCAA Tournament appearance since 2011, two seasons after taking over a team that went 11-14. They earned a No. 10 seed, beat No. 7 Texas A&M in the first round and lost to No. 2 Texas in the round of 32.
The hiring ends a search that began Jan. 19, when Notre Dame announced Mike Brey would step down at the conclusion of the season and end a 23-year-run. Brey, 63, went 483-280 as the Irish’s head coach and left as the program’s all-time wins leader. He reached 13 NCAA Tournaments in 23 seasons, but just one since 2018. Notre Dame went 11-21 and 3-17 in the ACC in his final year and was 9-10 (1-7 ACC) when the change was announced.
In hiring Shrewsberry, Notre Dame is leaning into its location with a coach who has deep Indiana roots. Shrewsberry spent two separate stints at Purdue as an assistant for Matt Painter, first from 2011-13 and then 2019-21. He was a Butler assistant from 2008-11 under Brad Stevens and coached in two national title games. He followed Stevens to the Boston Celtics as an assistant in 2013 and stayed until 2019.
Stevens hired Shrewsberry at Butler from NAIA program Indiana-South Bend, where Shrewsberry was the head coach from 2005-07. He took over a 22-loss team, went 3-27 his first year and 11-18 in his second. He was the director of basketball operations at Marshall from 2003-05, an assistant at DePauw from 2001-03 and at Wabash from 1999-2000.
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Penn State went from 14-17 in Shrewsberry’s first season to 23-14 (10-10 Big Ten) in his second by becoming one of the best 3-point shooting and ball-handling teams in the country.
The Nittany Lions ended the season ranked ninth nationally in three-point percentage (38.7), seventh in turnover rate (13.7), 10th in three-point volume (47.1 percent of field goal attempts) and 13th in adjusted offensive efficiency, per KenPom. They started three fifth-year seniors, including Associated Press second-team All-American guard Jalen Pickett, and played two more in their rotation. All five shot at least 38 percent on three-pointers. Pickett was fourth nationally in assists per game (6.6), adding 17.7 points and 7.4 rebounds per game.
Shrewsberry inherits a Notre Dame roster with just five scholarship players for 2023-24, if excluding unlikely-to-return grad student guard Cormac Ryan. The Irish had four other grad students exhaust their eligibility after this season and three players enter the transfer portal on the first day it opened. Among those five players is the lone 2023 signee, Mishawaka (Ind.) Penn three-star guard Markus Burton.
Georgetown reportedly had Shrewsberry among its leading candidates for its head-coach opening before it hired Ed Cooley on Monday. Multiple reports also identified Shrewsberry as a top target for Providence to replace Cooley almost immediately after Cooley left.
