Micah Shrewsberry believes Notre Dame’s culture improved since loss to The Citadel
It hasn’t exactly been a dream first season for Micah Shrewsberry as the head men’s basketball coach at Notre Dame. Sitting at 10-16, the Irish have been playing catch up to most of the ACC this season.
But lately, Shrewsberry thinks things have been picking up. And he credits one big reason since the season hit a nadir with a loss to The Citadel on Dec. 19.
“I think our culture got better,” Shrewsberry said after a recent win against Louisville. “We had a lot of honest truths that were spoken, to each other. I gave them the opportunities to tell me where I could be better, because we’re all in this together. It’s not just me leading the charge and I’m sitting on some pedestal and these guys are following. No. We’re all fighting together and we’re all doing this together. So there’s ways that I had to be better and I told them I would. And there’s ways that they had to be better and I told them how. And we’ve really come together as a group since then.”
The improvement that Shrewsberry saw didn’t exactly translate to greater results on the court.
That included a seven-game losing streak running through most of January and into February. But Shrewsberry chalked that up to some unfortunate run ins on the schedule.
Overall, he felt his Notre Dame squad was getting better all along.
“And like I said, sometimes the record doesn’t show it,” Shrewsberry said. “We lose seven games in a row. But we were playing, almost everybody we played was hot. Virginia was rolling when we went there and [got beat]. Pitt was rolling when they beat us. On and on and on. So we were playing better basketball, we just weren’t getting the results. But when they kept showing up with joy and energy and passion, that’s when I knew we were headed in the right direction.”
Shrewsberry said a recent win over Georgia Tech was a confidence boost
A recent win at Georgia Tech is one that he expects to go a long way for the team’s confidence.
After the game, Shrewsberry first praised the team’s energy and is hoping to build on that moving forward.
“It’s big, man, because we had different times throughout the game where we talked about bringing your own energy,” Shrewsberry said. “Like they can hear me loud and clear tonight, but we should be talking to each other in the same way and bringing our own energy and helping each other. I think the guys on the bench that are always up and always cheering that don’t get a chance to play are a big part of what we do and who we are as a team.”
Notre Dame came into the Georgia Tech game having lost seven of the last eight games. However, as Shrewsberry explained, he saw the Irish doing the right things that they’ve been working on all season against the Yellow Jackets.
“But for us to make some plays late, when we haven’t been in a tight game like this where we had the side out of bounds play, Tae [Davis’] layup late in the clock, we had a couple of late out of bounds plays where like those are execution plays. You’ve got to execute. You’ve got to get something done in that moment. We were down on timeouts. You’re worried about using them and when you use them. So, for them to run that out of bounds play and we hadn’t worked on it in a long time, and there were guys in a bunch of different spots, for them to execute that and get a bucket,” Shrewsberry said.
“Like, that’s just the confidence we have, that work that we’ve put in, the growth that you’re seeing from this group.”
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