Notre Dame men's basketball head coach Micah Shrewsberry met with local reporters Tuesday afternoon for the program's Media Day. Here's everything he had to say.
Answers are largely verbatim. Questions may have been edited for brevity and clarity.
MICAH SHREWSBERRY
How’d you do as reporter today? (Shrewsberry was interviewing players for a video the program is producing.)
“Anytime we can have a little fun with these guys, we want to do it. We work hard, but we enjoy our time together. This is a group I love being around. It’s good to get some laughs in.”
Did Cole Certa know how to spell Nikita Konstantynovskyi’s last name?
“He got the first — he got Konstant and then he was done after that. Now we just need to work on Nikita spelling Cole’s first name correctly. He said ‘K’ instead of ‘C.’ I don’t know. Maybe it’s something native.”
Anything new or surprising since we talked to you last week about practice?
“Playing with seven guys on a team when you split teams up — one team’s got seven, the other team’s got seven — you’re doing a lot of stuff up and down. You’re playing a lot. Guys are getting tired. We’re kind of charting our progress right now, especially offensively, in what we’re doing. We’re taking the right shots. We’re shooting it where we want to shoot it. We’re shooting good percentages on the shots we want to get to. I think our 3-point percentage will continue to go up as we start getting our legs under us, as we start getting in better shape. Especially with the pace that we want to play at, I think it will go up as well. No other surprises. We still have a ways to go defensively. We need to work on some different things, especially offensively, with how people try and guard us and what they’re going to do to counter those things.”
We just talked to a bunch of them. They’re all pretty confident and excited for the year. How much do you like the fact that they’re not shy about chasing big dreams this year?
“They should. We don’t want to hide from anything. They should have expectations. We have a confident group. We have a tough group. We have a group that’s together. When you put those things all in the mix, that adds to some good stuff that can happen. We’re fired up about it. I love coming in here every single day with these guys.”
How much easier will it be to play an aggressive style with a deeper bench this year?
“Being able to play the way we want to play. But then there’s hard choices to make too. You can’t play everybody. But we’re going to try to with the pace that we’re going to play at. We can try and enforce our will and try and wear people down the best that we can. So we can play at the same pace from the start of the game through the end of the game.”
How is Markus Burton better than a year ago?
“His decision-making has continued to improve. His trust level with the guys on this team — seeing the different pieces that we have, playing with different guys at different times, he’s really trusting everybody to make plays. He doesn’t feel like he has to do it himself. That part of it. But he’s done a great job of scoring it. He’s shooting it and scoring it in different ways. His game has continued to evolve offensively all within the structure of what we’re trying to do.”
How does it raise the competition level when there’s tough rotation decisions to make?
“It doesn’t matter how we split the teams, they are almost always pretty even. I could have an idea of, ‘Hey, we’re going to split this here.’ You never know who’s winning. That’s the biggest thing. We’re tracking stats in practice. We’re tracking wins and losses, too. This is a big point for us right now. How are we playing as a group? But how the different groups play well together. That’s how we kind of form who’s going to play.”
What’s it been like to be a part of the recruiting buzz you’ve created the past couple weeks?
“It’s a credit to the staff’s hard work. It hasn’t been easy. It’s a lot of hours, a lot of man power, a lot of time. We talk about family, but it truly is family. It’s my wife hosting families on the weekends during football weekends. It’s some of our assistant coaches’ wives not seeing their husbands for a while. There’s a lot of sacrifice that goes into this. But to feel the buzz, it’s a great credit, especially for our staff, for our staff’s families. But then it’s also a testament to the guys on our team. They’ve been some of the biggest recruiters that we’ve had. Everybody has loved spending time with our freshmen. Not just them, but everybody on our team. We have a great group of guys that people want to be around. We have a great system that we’re going to play. We have an unbelievable university and alumni base and everything else that we can sell. It makes it easy for us when you’re recruiting the right kids.”
If last year was a reset year for this program, what can this year be?
“We need to continue to step forward. We can get closer to how we want to play, the vision of how we wanted to play. For me, that changes from year to year. I don’t think you can look at one year and see the exact same thing the next year, especially in a style of play or a system of what we do. But how we move the ball, how we share the ball, how we compete, how fast we want to play, all of those things can begin to show themselves. Now you can start showing more film. Now I can show less Penn State basketball when I’m recruiting, and I can show more Notre Dame basketball. We’re getting closer to that phase right now.”
What’s been the most rewarding process of getting those 2025 commits?
“The most rewarding is just seeing the hard work pay off. Sometimes you have no clue. Somebody I was talking to said, ‘It’s like turning on a faucet.’ Once you turn it on, it can get rolling. But if it never gets turned on, that’s a struggle too. We were at a struggle for a while. 2025 has been a slower cycle for recruiting across the country. You never know what’s going to happen. It just so happened for us at one time. The payoff, the hours that you put in, the time, but also the plan. This has been, since I got the job last year, what we’ve pointed towards and what we’ve tried to do. Now you’re kind of seeing that coming to fruition a little bit.”
What’s your sense for those recruits not just buying into you or Notre Dame but the growth you saw on the court last season?
“That growth is what we’re pointing towards. I don’t know if they could always see it. But you can in stretches. Now you can see it more consistently. But we continue to keep building. What we want to do is stack good classes on top of good classes and keep adding good players. I love the foundation that we have. We’re getting back to a little bit old school, where you feel good about your seniors next year. You feel good about the junior class that will be there. You feel good about the freshman now that will be sophomores. Now the group that’s coming in, keep stacking classes together of guys that fit. Now your vision can start to come out for everybody to see it. Instead of just being my vision and showing a couple people, now more and more people start to see it, start to buy into it and start to believe in it.”
How are you handling the uncertainty of scholarship math and whether the settlement goes through to allow 15 scholarships?
“You have to sell an opportunity. If you get to 15 scholarships, it’s hard to sell opportunity. You’re just asking for people to transfer is what you’re asking for. If I tell you, you have an opportunity, and there’s 14 people on the roster next to you, you’re like, ‘How? When? Where?’ But we can point to it. It’s a constant math problem, I guess, to figure out what’s best. We always want to do best for our university. We always want to do what’s best for our program. Sometimes that’s not going to that number, because we want to retain our guys. How do we retain them? We show them that they have an opportunity to play here. We show them that they have an opportunity to have a role here. You can do that when it’s not a full boat.”
Answers are largely verbatim. Questions may have been edited for brevity and clarity.
MICAH SHREWSBERRY
How’d you do as reporter today? (Shrewsberry was interviewing players for a video the program is producing.)
“Anytime we can have a little fun with these guys, we want to do it. We work hard, but we enjoy our time together. This is a group I love being around. It’s good to get some laughs in.”
Did Cole Certa know how to spell Nikita Konstantynovskyi’s last name?
“He got the first — he got Konstant and then he was done after that. Now we just need to work on Nikita spelling Cole’s first name correctly. He said ‘K’ instead of ‘C.’ I don’t know. Maybe it’s something native.”
Anything new or surprising since we talked to you last week about practice?
“Playing with seven guys on a team when you split teams up — one team’s got seven, the other team’s got seven — you’re doing a lot of stuff up and down. You’re playing a lot. Guys are getting tired. We’re kind of charting our progress right now, especially offensively, in what we’re doing. We’re taking the right shots. We’re shooting it where we want to shoot it. We’re shooting good percentages on the shots we want to get to. I think our 3-point percentage will continue to go up as we start getting our legs under us, as we start getting in better shape. Especially with the pace that we want to play at, I think it will go up as well. No other surprises. We still have a ways to go defensively. We need to work on some different things, especially offensively, with how people try and guard us and what they’re going to do to counter those things.”
We just talked to a bunch of them. They’re all pretty confident and excited for the year. How much do you like the fact that they’re not shy about chasing big dreams this year?
“They should. We don’t want to hide from anything. They should have expectations. We have a confident group. We have a tough group. We have a group that’s together. When you put those things all in the mix, that adds to some good stuff that can happen. We’re fired up about it. I love coming in here every single day with these guys.”
How much easier will it be to play an aggressive style with a deeper bench this year?
“Being able to play the way we want to play. But then there’s hard choices to make too. You can’t play everybody. But we’re going to try to with the pace that we’re going to play at. We can try and enforce our will and try and wear people down the best that we can. So we can play at the same pace from the start of the game through the end of the game.”
How is Markus Burton better than a year ago?
“His decision-making has continued to improve. His trust level with the guys on this team — seeing the different pieces that we have, playing with different guys at different times, he’s really trusting everybody to make plays. He doesn’t feel like he has to do it himself. That part of it. But he’s done a great job of scoring it. He’s shooting it and scoring it in different ways. His game has continued to evolve offensively all within the structure of what we’re trying to do.”
How does it raise the competition level when there’s tough rotation decisions to make?
“It doesn’t matter how we split the teams, they are almost always pretty even. I could have an idea of, ‘Hey, we’re going to split this here.’ You never know who’s winning. That’s the biggest thing. We’re tracking stats in practice. We’re tracking wins and losses, too. This is a big point for us right now. How are we playing as a group? But how the different groups play well together. That’s how we kind of form who’s going to play.”
What’s it been like to be a part of the recruiting buzz you’ve created the past couple weeks?
“It’s a credit to the staff’s hard work. It hasn’t been easy. It’s a lot of hours, a lot of man power, a lot of time. We talk about family, but it truly is family. It’s my wife hosting families on the weekends during football weekends. It’s some of our assistant coaches’ wives not seeing their husbands for a while. There’s a lot of sacrifice that goes into this. But to feel the buzz, it’s a great credit, especially for our staff, for our staff’s families. But then it’s also a testament to the guys on our team. They’ve been some of the biggest recruiters that we’ve had. Everybody has loved spending time with our freshmen. Not just them, but everybody on our team. We have a great group of guys that people want to be around. We have a great system that we’re going to play. We have an unbelievable university and alumni base and everything else that we can sell. It makes it easy for us when you’re recruiting the right kids.”
If last year was a reset year for this program, what can this year be?
“We need to continue to step forward. We can get closer to how we want to play, the vision of how we wanted to play. For me, that changes from year to year. I don’t think you can look at one year and see the exact same thing the next year, especially in a style of play or a system of what we do. But how we move the ball, how we share the ball, how we compete, how fast we want to play, all of those things can begin to show themselves. Now you can start showing more film. Now I can show less Penn State basketball when I’m recruiting, and I can show more Notre Dame basketball. We’re getting closer to that phase right now.”
What’s been the most rewarding process of getting those 2025 commits?
“The most rewarding is just seeing the hard work pay off. Sometimes you have no clue. Somebody I was talking to said, ‘It’s like turning on a faucet.’ Once you turn it on, it can get rolling. But if it never gets turned on, that’s a struggle too. We were at a struggle for a while. 2025 has been a slower cycle for recruiting across the country. You never know what’s going to happen. It just so happened for us at one time. The payoff, the hours that you put in, the time, but also the plan. This has been, since I got the job last year, what we’ve pointed towards and what we’ve tried to do. Now you’re kind of seeing that coming to fruition a little bit.”
What’s your sense for those recruits not just buying into you or Notre Dame but the growth you saw on the court last season?
“That growth is what we’re pointing towards. I don’t know if they could always see it. But you can in stretches. Now you can see it more consistently. But we continue to keep building. What we want to do is stack good classes on top of good classes and keep adding good players. I love the foundation that we have. We’re getting back to a little bit old school, where you feel good about your seniors next year. You feel good about the junior class that will be there. You feel good about the freshman now that will be sophomores. Now the group that’s coming in, keep stacking classes together of guys that fit. Now your vision can start to come out for everybody to see it. Instead of just being my vision and showing a couple people, now more and more people start to see it, start to buy into it and start to believe in it.”
How are you handling the uncertainty of scholarship math and whether the settlement goes through to allow 15 scholarships?
“You have to sell an opportunity. If you get to 15 scholarships, it’s hard to sell opportunity. You’re just asking for people to transfer is what you’re asking for. If I tell you, you have an opportunity, and there’s 14 people on the roster next to you, you’re like, ‘How? When? Where?’ But we can point to it. It’s a constant math problem, I guess, to figure out what’s best. We always want to do best for our university. We always want to do what’s best for our program. Sometimes that’s not going to that number, because we want to retain our guys. How do we retain them? We show them that they have an opportunity to play here. We show them that they have an opportunity to have a role here. You can do that when it’s not a full boat.”
