STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (WHTM) — Micah Shrewsberry is leaving Penn State after two years as men’s basketball head coach to take the role at Notre Dame.
Shrewsberry led the Nittany Lions to their first NCAA Tournament win since 2001 last week beating Texas A&M in the first round. Penn State fell to No.2 Texas 71-66 in the second round.
According to CBS Sports, Notre Dame is finalizing a seven-year deal with Shrewsberry. The Indiana native spent his entire college coaching career in Indiana, up until his time at Penn State.
Micah was born and raised in Indiana, so naturally it is home. He grew up in southern Indiana until his family moved to Indianapolis at age 13. He continued his playing career in college at Hanover College in Hanover, Ind.
His lone stop outside of Indiana was with the Boston Celtics as an assistant from 2013-19.
His coaching acumen was well known as the head assistant for the Boston Celtics under Brad Stevens. But it wasn’t until Penn State hired Shrewsberry in 2021 that the coach got his shot at a Power Five head coaching job.
It’s no secret at this point that Shrewsberry took a failing program and turned it into a winner quickly. Even this season, Shrewsberry turned a four-game losing streak in February into eight wins in nine games propelling the team into the Big Ten Championship game and ultimately the NCAA Tournament.
He successfully kept players in Happy Valley during the coaching transition in 2021 and used the transfer portal with success rarely seen on as wide a scale. Jalen Pickett, Andrew Funk and Cam Wynter all became successful contributors this season and were portal products.
Did Penn State have a shot at keeping Shrewsberry?
When Penn State Athletic Director Pat Kraft was asked about retaining succesful coaches back on December 16, 2022, he said Penn State is in fact positioned to keep good coaches.
“I’m committed to keeping [-good coaches],” Kraft said. “Micah is a great coach. Micah is a really, really, really good coach.”
Details on how much Penn State was paying Shrewberry alone are not publicly available, but on the athletic department’s financial records, the basketball staff as a whole made $3.3 million during the 2021-22 fiscal year.
“It’s not just about paying the coach and the great coaches know that,” Kraft said of how to keep good coaches in December 2022. “It’s about keeping the staff. Being able to hire staff if you lose staff, which is part of the process.”
Kraft is widely looked at as one of the most proactive ADs in the country on NIL and department-wide success.
“It’s also about putting the infrastructure behind [coaches] to be successful,” Kraft said. “Where can I recruit? How do I recruit? How do I feed my athletes? How do I keep my athletes healthy? That infrastructure, which I think is lacked for a lot of our sports, is where I think we have to invest in now. And we started already doing that.”
In his tenure, which began in July 2022, Kraft has enjoyed a Penn State football Rose Bowl win and 11-win season, plus watched Wrestling win its 10th national title in 12 years.
“Paying the coach is great, but the great coaches understand it’s all the other stuff that helps you eventually win a national championship,” Kraft said.
