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5 questions with Marquette’s Shaka Smart

Shaka Smart has rebuilt Marquette. After taking the Golden Eagles to the NCAA Tournament in his first year in Milwaukee, Smart led the Golden Eagles to 27 wins last season along with both the Big East regular season and tournament titles for the first time in program history. I caught up with Smart on Tuesday in Milwaukee to discuss last season’s run, Marquette’s expectations, and much more.

Jon Rothstein: A year ago at this time, people were wondering how Marquette was going to replace Justin Lewis and Darryl Morsell. Your team then responded with the best season in program history. How did it happen?

Shaka Smart: Relationships. I would say our guys — more than any other team that I’ve ever coached — truly cared for one another, rooted for one another, and played for one another. They had an uncanny ability for bringing the best out of each other.

Rothstein: After you took VCU to the Final Four in 2011, you often defined the success of a season by whether or not you got back to the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament. However, after talking to you following your loss to Michigan State in the second round of the NCAA Tournament last spring, it felt like you still felt fulfilled. How did your overall perspective change?

Smart: College basketball is so unique. Those of us that are in it — we eat, sleep, and breathe it every day. But every March we’re reminded that it’s infinitely more important for the average fan during that month than it is the rest of the year. Now, that’s cool for us too because it’s like you’re at a get together and there’s five people there and then there’s five thousand. I think the flip side of that is your regular season can be overshadowed by the postseason if you let it. We choose to evaluate the successes and the failures from last season with a growth mindset. It’s easy to do that because we have a lot of the players and coaches back from that team. We’re certainly very driven and motivated by the fact that we didn’t play at our best in the last game of the year.

Rothstein: How will this year’s team be different than last year’s team?

Smart: All of our guys that are returning are a year older, a year better, and a year wiser. We have three incoming freshmen that are going to play and one incoming freshman that’s going to redshirt. Personnel wise, our team is different. We don’t have Olivier-Maxence Prosper, who was a critical piece. The way that we play will be somewhat similar, but there will be some small tweaks that we make based on personnel changes. Our imagination for what our team can be on either end of the floor is different than what it was a year ago.

Rothstein: You’re a coach that’s always relished the idea of hunting opponents and attempting to usurp expectations. What’s it going to be like now that you’re going to be hunted for the first time since you’ve been at Marquette?

Smart: I think you can still hunt. I don’t care what people say about you or how you’re thought of externally. The desire to hunt is hopefully intrinsic to who you are as a basketball program, as a player, or as a coach. We value the same things that we valued last year — relationships, growth, and victory. The way we go after those three things are very similar to the way that we’ve went after them in our first couple of years at Marquette. We’re very fortunate to have a group of guys who are hungry.

Rothstein: You’ve had the opportunity to be the head coach at basketball centric schools and once at a football centric school, when you were at Texas. Now that you’ve seen everything unfold in college athletics, how grateful are you to be coaching in a league like the Big East?

Smart: I love being part of the Big East. The importance of basketball at these schools in our league goes beyond description. The only accurate way to get a sense for that is to be in those arenas on game night or on those campuses on game day. It’s just something really, really special to be part of. It’s intense. It’s highly competitive. And it’s so much fun. The fact that it culminates at Madison Square Garden — it’s basically the perfect ending to a season for a conference. And when you’re in the Garden, you can’t help and feel a level of reverence and humility for the fact that our team is competing in this building where so many great players have played before.

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