PirateCrew: Seton Hall Pirates Football & Basketball Recruiting
The definitive source for all PirateCrew news.
By Zack Cziryak
TROVE: Coach Sha is especially known as a defense-first type of coach and it seems like you kind of have to pick one or the other. What latitude is there with time and resources to learn more and grow as a coach? Is there the opportunity to do that or do you have to pick what you're best at and focus on that? How do you divide your time and grow in areas where you're maybe weaker as a coach?
WHALEN: You say divide your time, I don't think you have to divide your time, I think you have to devote your time. I think that one of the many things I've learned from Coach is, and it's so cliche to say and people are going to hear this and be like this guy's crazy or he doesn't really mean this, but I really mean this: you have 24 hours in a day - how you spend those 24 hours is up to you. We're in practice for three hours a day. What are you doing the rest of your day to help yourself get better? It's funny because Coach Sha is a defensive coach, which he is 100%, and our defense is, since he's been a head coach, look at the numbers: top of every league, top of the country, very good at what we do. But I think his brain as an offensive coach doesn't get enough credit, because some of the stuff that we do and some of the stuff that he does to get guys open for shots or get guys in the right positions, it's very high-level stuff. And I don't think people think of him as an offensive coach. I just think that he's so good defensively, which he is, and the other side of it kind of gets dragged down a little bit.
If you watch how we move and how we operate, when guys aren't making shots, it's just bad luck sometimes. But for the most part Coach run sets that are getting guys open and to me that's the mark of a great coach. And the other side of a great coach is that willingness to learn and adapt. We don't run a Princeton offense, we don't run a base offense or a motion offense where we're going to do this one thing. The beauty is we can recruit players that fit how we want to play: tough, hard nosed, open to learning, can get better, haven't really hit their ceiling. And we can devise offensive schemes around that. We don't say 'Oh, well this guy can't do this very well so he can't come play here.' Coach can get 13 guys in a room that you know are your guys, your type of players, and you can figure everything else out from around there.
We have some base stuff that we do run, a lot of freedom of movement, freedom of motion, with the goal of not putting anybody in a box and we'll kind of tinker there from August. When these guys come back to school at the end of August we'll have an idea of 'Okay, defensively we laid the groundwork, offensively, we got a couple things in of this is our base, what we want to do and how we want to play. And then we'll draw or design some stuff up to fit our personnel. It's not strange at 2 or 3 in the morning to get a text from Coach Sha saying, 'I saw this while I was watching TV tonight what do you think about this?' Or 'Draw this up so when I get in in the morning we can talk about it.' He, myself, the other assistants, we're constantly talking offense and constantly talking about getting better and how we can get our guys in better positions. You know, like I said before, I'm only 38-years old. I don't know everything. I don't pretend to know everything. To me you're constantly learning, you're constantly growing. And when you stop learning maybe it's time to stop doing what you're doing and find something else to do.
