Rodney Terry working hard to put his team together, discusses additions of Kadin Shedrick, Max Abmas

Texas basketball coach Rodney Terry was part of a Longhorns athletics traveling town hall in San Antonio on Tuesday and had plenty to say about how his team, the first completely under his tutelage as head coach, is coming together.

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Terry, along with Texas athletics director Chris Del Conte, women’s basketball coach Vic Schaefer, and football coach Steve Sarkisian, were given a few minutes with the media before speaking to a crowd at an event hosted by the Alamo City’s chapter of the Texas Exes.

Terry said the past six weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind, but also said the process of building the team has been a blast.

“It’s always this way when you embark on a new chapter in terms of being a head coach, you know,” he said. “You put your staff together, you’re trying to put a roster together and you also got AAU basketball going on at the same time. It’s been good though. It’s been, I think, very well received by everybody I’ve had an interaction with.”

The Longhorns reached into the transfer portal to land Oral Roberts guard Max Abmas and Virginia forward Kadin Shedrick, two players that will vie immediately for playing time.

“Max is just one of those kids that he’s a winner – I mean, he’s won everywhere,” Terry said about Abmas. “He’s gonna be a guy that comes in and he’s gonna be an incredible basketball ambassador off the court and be a great player on the court. He can really shoot the basketball can make decisions with the basketball.

“And Kadin is a guy that’s also coming from a winning background and has had a chance to play for coach (Tony) Bennett over at Virginia,” Terry added about Shedrick. “He’s a guy that’s gonna give us elite rim protection, and he’s super athletic and can run the floor. I think he has more of an offensive game that didn’t show up to this point right now as well — talk about two talented players but two really good kids as well.”

On Wednesday, Texas announced that it had signed guard Chendall Weaver, late of UT-Arlington, and former UTEP forward Ze’Rik Onyema. 

Weaver, who is from Mansfield, played in 32 games and started 25 of them last year as a freshman, averaging 9.5 points, 4.6 rebounds and 2.0 assists in a team-best 29.5 in minutes per contest while earning Western Athletic Conference (WAC) Freshman of the Year accolades. He will have three years of eligibility remaining.

Onyema, from El Paso, played in 61 career games (32 starts) and registered 285 points (4.7 ppg) and 184 rebounds (3.0 rpg) in 872 minutes (14.3 mpg) over the last three seasons at UTEP. Last year as a sophomore in 2022-23, Onyema played in all 32 contests (31 starts), tied for the team lead in blocked shots (16) and ranked second in rebounding (4.4 rpg) and sixth in scoring (7.1 ppg) while playing 20.1 minutes per contest.

Texas had already secured returning benchmark forwards Dylan Disu and Brock Cunningham.

“We have a couple of core guys back,” Terry explained. “When you talk about Disu – he was as good as anybody in the country in the latter part of the season. Having Disu come back and Brock Cunningham come back who played really well for us to down the stretch and was really one of our main characters on the team.”

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Guard Tyrese Hunter and forward Dillon Mitchell could still return after testing the NBA Draft assessment process. Both, or neither, of the duo could return, but Hunter is more likely to do so.

“You got guys can come and go at any time and that’s just kind of the landscape of college athletics,” Terry said. “You got to adapt and adjust to that and you have to recruit guys until they get to campus.”