#Shaka smart player series

“A really smart, out of the box thinker.” “He’s an intellectual genius,” said Keith Dambrot, his boss at Akron. All of his bosses noticed the same thing. Over the next decade he made stops as an assistant coach at Dayton, Akron, Clemson and Florida. He picked up a master’s degree in social science there and more importantly, a love of coaching. He could’ve done anything, even considering a career in academia, but when his former college coach and father figure, Bill Brown, offered him a graduate assistant coaching job at California University of Pennsylvania, Smart was hooked. He was a four-year starter, a three-year captain, set the program record for assists and graduated magna cum laude with a degree in history. There, he could fulfill his dream of playing college basketball, even if it was only at the Division III level after Division I programs passed over the slender 5-foot-10 point guard.

Instead, Smart picked Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. The conventional decision would be the Ivy League. When it came time to decide on a college, he had acceptance letters from Harvard, Yale and Brown lining his inbox. He always earned impeccable academic marks. Though he was obsessed with the sport, he excelled more off of the court than on. Just the way people talk, the way they interact, the coaching.” “But culturally it was so very different. “It was basketball, which I loved,” he said. In the eighth grade that meant playing on two different basketball teams, one all-black and the other all-white, unbeknownst to each other. Growing up as a biracial kid in the small town of Oregon, Wisconsin, Smart was simultaneously too white and too black for his peers. Smart’s mother was from upper-middle-class Chicago, and raised Smart and his three siblings by herself on a teacher’s salary. He was gone by the time Smart was two years old, coming back into the picture for a few of his high school years before leaving for good. In retrospect, he says that’s about the only good thing his father ever did for him.Ī native of Trinidad, Smart’s father was an academic with four college degrees and zero interest in raising a family. But his father insisted on naming him after Shaka Zulu, a South African war hero who innovated combat techniques in the 19th century. Shaka Smart’s mother wanted to name him Brian, or something more ordinary. You can sign up for his newsletter, “No Content For Old Men,” here. He has shared with us his senior honors thesis from his time at Ball State University, which examines why so-called Cinderella teams can make Final Four runs.

#Shaka smart player series

“The Cinderella Code” is a six-part series by Matt Craig, who spent last season as the lead mid-major writer at The Fieldhouse, which is The Athletic’s national college basketball platform.