PirateCrew: Seton Hall Pirates Football & Basketball Recruiting
The definitive source for all PirateCrew news.
By JP Pelzman
I recently spoke with veteran Asbury Park Press and Gannett New Jersey writer and columnist Jerry Carino, who has covered Seton Hall basketball since the fall of 2003-04. We spoke about a wide range of topics concerning the Pirates and college hoops in general. This is part 1 of a three-part series.
JPP: In your role as Gannett New Jersey’s lead college basketball writer, you often checked in on Saint Peter’s. How much different of a sheriff is Shaheen Holloway going to be, compared to Kevin Willard?
JC: He's going to do a lot more himself. Now, Kevin did a lot of the coaching himself, but I think Sha is going to do a ton of the recruiting himself, whereas Kevin more came in at the end. I don’t know how involved Kevin was in laying the groundwork for recruiting.
Sha's going to be laying the groundwork. He's going to be deeply involved in the recruiting process for all these players. That’s number one. I think No. 2 is Sha is going to be harder on the players. He's going to work them harder. He's going to be more demanding. Not that Kevin wasn’t demanding, but you’re going to see a different level from Holloway. He's not a players’ coach. He's an old-school, hard-ass, my way or the highway type of coach.
I think Kevin wasn’t really like that. So that will be fascinating. I think Holloway will be blunt in his comments. Kevin was usually pretty straightforward after games. There were some things he wasn’t straightforward about, like injuries, but Sha is really going to be a blunt force and speak his mind a lot whereas Kevin sometimes did and sometimes didn’t.
I think Sha will be a front-man for the program. He will do a lot of fund-raising for the practice facility where Kevin didn’t, and he’s going to be doing public appearance type things that Kevin wouldn’t do.
JPP: I noticed Kevin softened over the years. I remember early on he would say stuff about his players, the Brian Olivers and Freddie Wilsons of the world, after the games, and later on, it would be more a collective. He wouldn’t call out players.
Do you think we might see Sha occasionally call out an individual player?
JC: That’s a great observation. Kevin was very hard publicly on players in his early years. He definitely did not do that in his later years. You had to really read between the lines to get the criticism of players. You're right. He definitely softened there.
With Holloway, we’ll see. He wasn’t under a spotlight there.
JPP: That’s true.
JC: I covered them more than anybody and when I saw them, they won. When people interviewed him during the NCAA Tournament, it was after these great victories.
How will he respond to a losing streak or a team not playing great or players slumping? I don’t know. I don’t think he’s going to coddle guys. He's not one to mince words.
JPP: It has taken Holloway a long time to finalize his staff, which has made many people nervous. Obviously, circumstances didn’t help. How do you see it?
JC: There are a lot of opinions on this. Obviously, staff is important. We know that. First of all, Holloway is very loyal to his guys and he had an incredible amount of success at Sant Peter’s. He's going to believe in those guys that helped him get there. I believe Rasheen Davis and Ryan Whalen are excellent coaches. Rasheen is a terrific recruiter, really well-regarded in the metropolitan area.
Ryan is a master tactician, which is really important, because there’s just no way Saint Peter’s beats the teams they beat in the NCAA Tournament without him, and obviously Holloway had a hand in that too. But Ryan was the driving force behind that and will be a good addition.
It seems the pursuit of Ashley Howard as the number one assistant has failed. I don’t know why. I know Ashley Howard is still getting paid (by LaSalle).
JPP: That’s probably it. It’s probably worth more money to him to sit out than to coach.
JC: I think what you might see is Holloway is going to have his third assistant from Saint Peter’s, Umar Shannon, who’s a young guy, in a recruiting role until they find a third guy, and maybe they won’t. You want to have three guys on the road recruiting and Umar Shannon maybe is going to fill that role for the time being, and maybe that will turn into his job.
What Sha is showing you so far is that he is a shark and he can be that lead recruiter and recruit at a high level. I mean, where are you going to get an established high-major recruiter in mid-May. I don’t see it.
JPP: It is late in the game.
JC: Umar Shannon was brought in in an operations type capacity when thy had their eyes on Ashley Howard. I can perhaps see him filling that (third) spot for the time being, and if you don’t find somebody else, he’s filling that position permanently and then you have all three assistants coming over from Saint Peter’s. That’s going to make a lot of people uneasy. But maybe it goes down easier after you’ve seen this core kill it in the transfer portal the last six weeks. And they’re not done yet.
JPP: This is a pull from my childhood. I think the older readers will get it. It seems to me Willard had the normal-sized doghouse whereas Holloway’s is like Snoopy’s doghouse from Peanuts. It looks normal on the outside but it’s got limitless space on the inside. I mean, if you don’t play the way he wants you to play, you're not going to play. And that’s it.
JC: That’s right. He's going to push guys onto the bench who don’t do what he wants them to do. And not just that, people may have issues with the way he runs his rotation. He's going to play a lot of guys. He's not going to change what got him to the Elite Eight. He's going to play 10 guys. Nobody is going to play max minutes.
JPP: I don’t think you can win with that at the Power 6 level. I mean, the top guy for Saint Peter’s (Daryl Banks III) averaged 26 minutes (26.6). That’s not going to fly at this level, I don’t think. Guys want their minutes.
I don’t think you can go 10 deep at this level. I know he’s assembling a lot of talent, but I don’t think you can do it. We'll see what happens.
JC: We'll see. I don’t even know if there’s a clear alpha-dog type player.
JPP: That’s true. That might help.
JC: Right now they don’t have a guy that warrants those major minutes. At Saint Peter’s he had CAA Player of the Year (in 2021-22) Aaron Estrada and he didn’t want to be in that rotation and he transferred to Oregon and didn’t play at all. So he wound up at Hofstra where he got his minutes.
JPP: The alum in me would like to thank Sha.
JC: (laughs). There you go. Some people are going to push back against that. But he’s bringing in all these guys. He's going to have to play them all.
Do I think Holloway is going to restrict a Big East player of the year type guy to 25 minutes? No. But he doesn’t have that guy right now.
So I think he’ll play that, play a lot of guys, wear-you-down style.
We'll see how he handles it. Do people push back? Do people’s people (handlers) push back?
JPP: That's the big thing.
JC: We'll see how he handles it. I doubt he had to deal with peoples’ people at Saint Peter’s.
He's brought in some capable contributors. He's brought in a few that are going to help. That’s good. The problem is they’re all guards. He's brought in a lot of talent on that roster. He's got guys that play the way he wants to play. Every guy defends and is tough. But they don’t have any size, JP! They've gotta get size, man. They have one big guy, Tyrese Samuel. I don’t care how tall Tray Jackson is. He plays on the perimeter.
JPP: Yeah, even calling him a wing is stretching it. He just shoots threes. Like you say, he’s a guard.
JC: I know Samuel has some perimeter tendencies but he rebounds.
JPP: He got more physical last year, yeah.
JC: He's a Big East big.
JPP: He is. But that’s it.
JC: He's the only one.
JPP: You can’t take that lineup into the Big East.
JC: They got some good shooters. I like Al-Amir Dawes and I think Jamir Harris will flourish, so they have shooters, but it’s hard to find bigs at this stage. Right now, the roster is pretty lopsided. I am curious to see what he’s going to do but I do have concerns that the roster is pretty lopsided. But I do think the guys he brought in are going to have an impact.
But they need size in the worst way.
Last edited:
