Shaka Smart on Relationships

Shaka Smart hasn’t taken a transfer in four years. The reason why goes beyond basketball

By Rustin Dodd, The Athletic

Every morning, Shaka Smart does three things. First he meditates, hoping to calm a restless mind. Next, he walks outside for a dose of morning light. Then he sits down to read, jotting down meaningful passages in a journal and sending screenshots to a sprawling group of players, coaches and friends. Smart, the head basketball coach at Marquette, started crafting the routine eight or nine years ago, when he was still the coach at Texas.

The principal reason was simple: He was an incredibly anxious person.

For most of his life, he had coped by doing — by hitting the accelerator first thing in the morning and attacking the day head on. But as he got older, that approach no longer worked. His wife, Maya, suggested a book called “The Untethered Soul,” a self-help guide about consciousness by the writer Michael A. Singer. The paperback version was only 181 pages, short enough to cruise through, and when he was done, his copy was filled with annotated sections and underlined sentences. Soon enough, he read it again.

The book helped untangle the thoughts in his head, quieting the inner voice and sending him down a path of exploration. He read books by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a professor and mindfulness teacher, and Eckhart Tolle, the German-born spiritual guide. He sought out leadership ideas from coaches across sports. He developed a central idea that he calls the paradox: No matter how hard he worked, no matter how much he cared, no matter how much time he poured into his job, his work was not who he truly was.

In time, his morning meditation sessions became focused on two questions: Who am I? Who am I not?

Smart is telling me this story over the phone about seven weeks before the start of the college basketball season. The ostensible reason for the call is simple. In college basketball in 2025, Marquette is an anomaly. In an era of the transfer portal — of yearly roster churn and de facto free agency — the program has not taken a transfer player in four years.

Some of the reasons are structural. Marquette, a private Jesuit institution in the Big East, does not have the budget or resources of a blue blood program. The other reasons, however, offer a story about leadership, which is why Smart is explaining his morning routine. Like many coaches, his philosophy is rooted in a deep belief about the power of relationships — the kind that have powered the Golden Eagles to the NCAA Tournament for four straight years. Unlike most, his process includes in-depth study of other coaches, morning meditation and daily consciousness work.

“If you really analyze Shaka, he’s an intellectual that coaches basketball,” said Keith Dambrot, the former head coach at Akron, where Smart was an assistant. “There’s not really many of those in college basketball.”

Smart is the rare coach who will quote Maya Angelou and Nick Saban within a few minutes. He shadows NFL coaches, finds inspiration in rugby, and uses the African philosophy of Ubuntu, a concept of shared humanity and interconnectedness, which he actually borrowed from NBA coach Doc Rivers, a Marquette alum.

The way Smart sees it, one of the greatest ways to lead is to learn from others. Which leads to an intriguing question:

What can we learn from Smart?

One day in the midst of the pandemic, Smart logged onto a Zoom call with Tom Perrin, a former college basketball assistant at Virginia who left coaching to build a practice as an executive coach for CEOs. The men had connected through Lance Blanks, a former NBA executive. Blanks told Smart that Perrin could help him. On their first call, Smart had one request.

“Tom,” he said. “I want to know what I’m missing.”

Smart had long been curious about the human condition. During his first month at Kenyon University, a Division III school in Ohio, he took an Intro to Psychology course and learned about the fundamental attribution error, a bias that explained a reality of human nature: We are more likely to view another person’s mistake as reflective of their character while judging our own errors as a product of circumstance. Smart found it fascinating. The son of a single mother, he had spent his childhood studying and emulating others. But this was the first time he realized that psychology could be applied to sports. Not long after, he started thinking about coaching.

His first Division I assistant job came at Akron, a mid-major program trying to find its footing. One day Smart sat down with his mother, Monica, inside his apartment in Akron. As a child, Smart says, his mother had treated he and his siblings “like only children,” nurturing their varied interests. For Smart, that meant basketball, and she shared with him a maxim once made famous by Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes: You win with people. Together, Smart and his mother went through the Akron roster, diving into each player’s personal history and identifying their leadership traits. The conversation served as the foundation for what Smart later called the “Five Star Leader,” a simple framework for the five ways a person can lead.

1. EXAMPLE — Take care of your own stuff

2. ENCOURAGEMENT — Giving energy

3. MENTORING — Directing and empowering

4. ACCOUNTABILITY — Say what needs to be said

5. OWNERSHIP — Take full responsibility

Smart kept building on the idea during a one-year stint as an assistant at Florida and later when he became head coach at VCU in 2009 at the age of 31, one of the youngest Division I coaches in the country. He based his style on a quote from Angelou, the legendary poet and civil rights activist: “If you know better, you do better.”

He scoured the country, looking for ideas on leadership and culture. When he stumbled upon an interview with Jack Clark, the rugby coach at Cal-Berkeley, he didn’t just steal his definition of leadership (“Leadership is making those around you better”), he made sure Clark spoke to the graduate students in VCU’s Center for Sport Leadership program. Then he set aside an hour to pick his brain.

“The words that come to mind for me when I think about Shaka is that he’s just very intentional,” Clark said. “Which is not what a lot of coaches are. The things he believes in are very real and they become very real to the team that he’s coaching.”

A lot of coaches have slogans, Clark told Smart, but there was a power in writing things down, in creating a nomenclature and glossary for his players to understand.

“If leadership is the thing we’re going to talk about and we’re gonna aspire to, let’s define it,” Clark said.

Smart took the idea to the extreme. When he guided VCU to the Final Four in 2011, he built his program around five core values: appreciation, enthusiasm, competitiveness, accountability, and teamship, an idea that focused on the collective. Then he took over the Texas program in 2015, and his team finished 11-22 in his second season. By most measures, it was the worst year of his career. But it was also the period he learned the most.

To capture the lessons, he started writing them down, creating what he calls the Culture Document, a 27-page road map for a program. It’s a living document, never finished, updated each year. The version at Marquette outlines the program’s three core values — Relationships, Growth, Victory — and the seven principles that undergird them.

The section on relationships alone is eight pages — complete with photos and graphics that show the behaviors in action. One excerpt:

OUR BOND DETERMINES OUR SPIRIT

(Opposite: We’ll be high energy without caring about one another)

The more closely we are connected around our mission, the stronger our spirit grows. When our minds are clouded, our spirit is weak. When our minds are clear and unified, our spirit is incredibly powerful. This is very challenging for people outside our program to understand. But we understand.

This is where Smart was as a coach when he decided to approach Perrin, the executive coach, and ask for more help. He still worried he was missing something.

“He’s almost maniacal about improving himself,” Perrin said.

Perrin emphasized the importance of “alone time.” Many leaders, he said, don’t give themselves enough time to think. He zoned in on a common fallacy in coaching — that a team can outperform a staff.

“This whole idea of improving and developing yourself by turning inward and spending time there,” Perrin said. “Nobody disagrees with it. It’s just nobody gets to it — except Shaka.”

On the inside of his office door, Smart has a sign with the following question:

“Why can’t you love me right?”

The quote is from a story he heard from George Raveling, the pioneering college basketball coach who later became an executive at Nike. There was once a player, Raveling told Smart, who opened himself to a coach who felt distant. “You say you love us,” the player said. “But the message resonated with Smart. If he was going to tell his players he loved them, he needed to go about it the right way.

When Smart first arrived at Marquette in March 2021, he had to build a roster while re-recruiting some of the players already there. One of them was Oso Ighodaro, a big man who hadn’t played the year before. Just days after arriving, Smart and his staff put Ighodaro through a series of grueling workouts; Ighodaro kept dropping his head.

Smart likes to preach “Giannis posture” — everyone in the program must have the body language of Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Milwaukee Bucks’ MVP — so he struck a deal with Ighodaro. For each time he dropped his head, every member of the basketball staff was going to do a minute-long plank. Ighodaro did it 21 times; Smart and the staff then cranked out 21 minute-long planks.

“It was probably a human resources violation,” Smart said. “We even had the ladies that work up in the office.”

Ighodaro came to learn that Smart “lives the stuff” he preaches. He stayed at Marquette and became an NBA player.

There is no one way to construct a college basketball program, but Smart believes in the power of connection. The best relationships take time. He has learned this is who he is; this is how he wants to coach.

“We think that the best way to maximize that growth is to unpack your bags and really put roots down,” Smart said.

On the wall of his office, he has 16 pictures of himself with different players. The photos are not from the beginning, and they are not from the end. They’re all from the middle.

“The best part is the middle,” he said. “It’s the journey. It’s imperfect. It’s hard. It includes twists and turns. My favorite stories are the ones that are in the middle.”

One afternoon in September, I received a text from Smart. During our interview that morning, I had mentioned that I’d read The Untethered Soul, the book his wife had recommended to him years before. He wanted to know what I thought.

“What was your biggest takeaway?” he asked.

Maybe he was just being nice, but this seemed to be one of those moments that everyone — coaches, friends, acquaintances — kept telling me about. He seemed genuinely interested in my opinion.

Here was another chance to connect, to learn and share and answer the two questions that seem to drive him as a leader: Who am I? Who am I not?

I told him the book had offered a greater understanding for the idea of consciousness — for the voice in my head. It reminded me of something I read in “The Inner Game of Tennis.” Even when I know it’s a facade or persona, I said, it was hard for me to quiet those thoughts.

There was also a part in a chapter about the idea of Tao. It stuck with me.

“Eventually, you will see that in the way of the Tao, you’re not going to wake up, see what to do, and then go do it. In the Tao, you are blind and you have to learn to be blind.”

“Powerful stuff,” Smart texted back.

Then he added there was a podcast version he sometimes listens to. He was going to share it. He thought I might like it.