SHIVA SENTHIL – OBERLIN COLLEGE MEN’S BASKETBALL HEAD COACH – EPISODE 779

Website – https://goyeo.com/sports/mens-basketball

Email – ssenthi1@oberlin.edu

Twitter – @CoachSenthil

Shiva Senthil just completed his first season as head men’s basketball coach at Oberlin College in the state of Ohio.  Senthil came to Oberlin after a successful three-year tenure as the head coach at SUNY-Canton in Canton, New York. In 2020 Shiva was one of just 30 honorees nationally across all divisions to be named to the 2019-20 Under Armour / National Association of Basketball Coaches 30-under-30 team.

Prior to his arrival at SUNY-Canton, Senthil spent the 2018-19 season as an assistant coach at the University of Chicago.  He has additional coaching stops as an assistant at Clarkson University (2016-18), SUNY-Purchase (2015-16) and Michigan-Dearborn (2014-15).

As a player, Senthil helped Hartwick College reach the NCAA Tournament two times (2011, 2012) and in 2014 he served as a student assistant coach at Hartwick.  

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Take some notes as you listen to this episode with Shiva Senthil, head men’s basketball coach at Oberlin College in the state of Ohio.

What We Discuss with Shiva Senthil

• How his mom got him into basketball as a way to keep him busy and eventually became a fan of the game herself
• His dream of playing college basketball and his lack of knowledge about the process
• Scoring 27 points in a half in high school
• Playing for Todd McGuinness at Hartwick College
• His original plans of going to law school
• How a knee injury led to him becoming a student assistant coach at Hartwick
• Allow your best players to be the best versions of themselves
• “If we can’t make our best players good, we’re not very good coaches.”
• The number of hard decisions that head coaches have to make
• How tough it can be not to play a kid you really like
• “.I love trying to figure out how do we beat our opponent, put ourselves in the best position to succeed and it’s just like a puzzle to me and I love that.”
• “We want players to work hard in the off season. We have to do the exact same thing and continue to improve as coaches and continue to improve what we want to do on the floor.”
• His first coaching job at Michigan-Dearborn and working at the local YMCA to make ends meet
• Learning to be resilient in that first year of his career
• How to build your team’s reputation within the campus community and how to get your guys to care about more than just winning or losing.
• “There needs to be a championship mindset. There needs to be a standard of excellence in every single situation you are in.”
• “If you can figure out the process to be successful, then the success is going to come.”
• Why he loves high academic basketball and his experiences at Clarkson and the University of Chicago
• “All of our guys are here for the right reasons. Basketball’s really important to them, but they understand they also want a really good education.”
• Preparing for his interview for the SUNY Canton job with Chad O’Donnell
• “I think you can you can work as an assistant for a long time, but until you’re a head coach, like you just don’t know what’s going to be thrown at you.”
• “The one thing I always believed in is I thought in order to win big games or in order to be consistently successful, you had to be tough, you had to be physical, and you had to be good defensively.”
• “There’s so much history in the league, there’s so many good teams in the league, and it’s a league where if you can win the league, you can compete with everyone.”
• ” I felt comfortable that Oberlin is a place that not only can you provide students a really good education, but you can actually win at a really high level if you do it the right way.”
• “I grow from my assistants just like they’re growing from me.”
• “One of your jobs as a head coach is to develop your staff and it’s your responsibility to make sure whenever they get a head coaching job, they are ready.”
• Reviewing the film from every game at season’s end to get a feel for the team’s strengths and weaknesses
• “In division three, I think in the off season there’s two things that are really important. You have to recruit and you have to prepare for next year.”
• The recruiting process at Oberlin
• “We always just try to talk to our guys as much as possible, be around them, just letting them know that we’re there for them in any way possible, whether it’s on or off the court.”
• “The biggest thing we’re trying to get out of a practice more than even defense or offenses. We want to teach our guys how to compete. We want to make sure our guys come out of every practice, understanding what it’s like to play hard, because that’s the standard it takes to win a championship.”
• Dividing your team into teams/groups for practice
• His system for tracking rebounding in practice
• Tracking how often the get three stops in a row defensively and how that translates to winning
• Building a program at a place without a track record of success

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THANKS, SHIVA SENTHIL

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TRANSCRIPT FOR SHIVA SENTHIL – OBERLIN COLLEGE MEN’S BASKETBALL HEAD COACH – EPISODE 779

[00:00:00] Mike Klinzing: Hello and welcome to the Hoop Heads Podcast. It’s Mike Klinzing here without my co-host Jason Sunkle, who is with his four kids and his wife on his way to Disney World in Florida. God bless him. He’s going and taking four kids under the age of eight, so he claims it’s a vacation. I’m not quite sure if that’s the case, but we are pleased to welcome Shiva Senthil, the head men’s basketball coach at Oberlin College here in the state of Ohio. Shiva, welcome to the Hoop Heads Pod.

[00:00:24] Shiva Senthil: Thanks for having me, Mike. I’m excited. This should be a lot of fun.

[00:00:30] Mike Klinzing: Thrilled to have you on. Looking forward to diving into all the things that you’ve been able to do in your career thus far. Let’s go back in time to when you were a kid. Tell me a little bit about some of your first experiences with the game of basketball.

[00:00:38] Shiva Senthil: Yeah, so it’s funny I’ve listened to a couple of these podcasts and like listened to your episode with Coach Sullivan or Coach Dewitt from Ohio Wesleyan. Like a lot of coaches come from these coaching families or this sports family. And I didn’t, mine was very different. My parents were both kind of academics and they didn’t know much about sports at all at the time, but my mom just wanted me to kind of be active and she wanted me to have some after school activities.

So she got me into basketball by just kind of putting me into a Y M C A league after school where we practiced after school play on the weekends. And for me, that kind of started my love for sports. And that was probably around the third grade. And from there, I played basketball, football, lacrosse, baseball, some years, all of them in the same year.

Pray for my parents, , but for me, I always kind of just gravitated back to basketball. Like I remember like we would’ve football practices in late August, early September, and we would practice from five to seven and then there would still be light, a daylight out and even after football practice, I would want to go back and play one-on-one my brother or two on two with the kids in the neighborhood.

So no matter what sport it was, I always kind of gravitated back to basketball. So that, that’s, that’s how I knew I loved basketball. But it kind of all came back to my mom just kind of wanting to, wanting me to have a afterschool activity.

[00:02:00] Mike Klinzing: It’s funny how just a small little turn of the page can make such a difference in your life, and you think about if your mom had said, Hey, why don’t you go pick up the trumpet instead of, Hey, why don’t we get you involved in sports?

This is kind of amazing how things can kind of take a fork in the road.

[00:02:15] Shiva Senthil: Exactly. Like, me and my parents still talk about that and she’s like, I would’ve never anticipated you’re going to make a career out of it. It was just something so you kind of stay active and stay healthy and little do we know 30 years later, I’m still actively involved in it, so it’s wild

[00:02:31] Mike Klinzing: Do your parents know more about basketball now?

[00:02:32] Shiva Senthil: Oh, my mom is obsessed. It’s nuts. Like my mom watches more basketball than me maybe Like she watches every single, she watches the NBA game every night. Like every night she’ll text me like, Hey, did you see Damian Lillard do this? Did you see Steph Curry do this?

And like half the time I’m like, mom, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Like, I didn’t see the game. But she’s obsessed with it.

[00:02:50] Mike Klinzing: That’s awesome. That is very cool. It’s amazing how somebody who really wasn’t that interested in the game suddenly becomes interesting. I’d say my mom was similar. To that.

Like she met my dad who was a sports guy, and not that my mom was not into athletics at all, but certainly she wasn’t a fan. And now I’ll talk to them and they’re almost 80 and I’ll talk to them on the phone and they’ll be like, yeah, we were watching, they’re in Florida, so they’ll be like, we were watching the Gators and this, and my mom’s got opinions and my dad and all this stuff.

It’s funny how, again, the things that your kids get into kind of how they followed through on just being able to watch your kid and then that sort of generates your own interest as you go forward. So when you think back to that time as a kid, and as you said, you keep gravitating back towards basketball, what do you remember about maybe that moment or just sort of the gradual, as you started to take the game more seriously, was there a point where you really started to get into it and think, Hey, this is something that I really want to work on and get better?

And then when that happened, what did that look like?

[00:03:51] Shiva Senthil: Yeah. So I would say that probably happened to me around high school. I played kind of every sport leading up to high school, but I think at most of the sports, I was mediocre at best. And compared to kind of just local, upstate New York kids, like basketball was absolutely my best sport.

And it’s like I said, it was the one that I enjoyed playing the most anyway, so around the ninth grade, that’s when I decided like, Hey, I think I want to go do this in college. Like, I want to go play college basketball. I love this game. Anyway, so that’s when I really, really started focusing on it. And that’s when, like after school, every day I would try to go to our Y M C A and me and my brother and we had another friend, and we would get shots up, we would work out.

I started playing AAU basketball around the ninth grade time and it just became an all year thing for me. And it kind of became an obsession for me. And it’s funny, my friends at that point used to make a joke, like, They’re like, do you have a cot in the Y M C A? because I just used to be there every single night after school until it closed and it just like, it was right around that ninth grade period where I really, really decided like, Hey, I want to try and play in college.

[00:04:57] Mike Klinzing: When you think about that time and wanting to be a college basketball player, what was your thought? What was your idea? What was your sort of framework of what that meant to be a college basketball player. Did you think about, Hey, I’m going to go play at Duke or North Carolina. How much knowledge did you have about sort of what the process was like?

I think it’s always interesting to hear somebody talk about kind of where they fit. And obviously as we go on, there’s more and more information available to people about, hey, this is the level where you can play. But at a certain point you have to kind of figure it out for yourself. So where was your level of knowledge, I guess is my question?

[00:05:30] Shiva Senthil: Oh, I had none. Like absolutely none. Ninth grade me thought I was going to make the N B A. It’s funny. So like, I was pretty good relatively, like I played I played freshman basketball, JV basketball, and I was always pretty good. But then when I got to varsity, Like I played on a exceptionally mediocre high school basketball team, but the league we played in every other team had division one guys, like high major guys.

I think the best player in my league, my senior ended up playing at Penn State. And when I got to the varsity level, that was when I really realized, I was like, Hey, I’m not like these dudes, like these dudes are way better than me. So that’s when I kind of realized like, hey, I think I could play college basketball, but like it’s probably going to be small college basketball.

And even then I have to like find a niche and figure out what I’m going to be really good at. But to me it really didn’t happen until like maybe even like the 10th grade year when I started watching varsity basketball games and saw like how good really good players really are.

[00:06:27] Mike Klinzing: It’s so true. I think that. Such a non-realistic view that a lot of people have when they start thinking about, and of course, again, what do most people see on tv? You see Division one basketball. That’s what people talk about a lot. And yet at the same time, I think when you think about parents and kids, there’s this, they just are not oftentimes realistic about what their kid can do.

So for you to be able to kind of come to that realization and then sort of figure out, okay, what’s my path to be able to do that, which we’ll talk about in a second. When you think back to your high school career, do you have a favorite moment as a high school basketball player that stands out? Could be on or off the court.

[00:07:05] Shiva Senthil: Yeah. There’s one win in particular that really stood stands out to me. I still kind of look back at it and like I’m still in a group chat with some of my high school basketball teammates and friends from high school, and we kind of talk about it from time to time. And it’s, like I said, we play we, I played on a exceptionally mediocre team and like we had like a, like we had like three or four division three guys on our team, and we played in a league where most of the good teams had division one guys and multiple division one guys.

But there was a game. We were playing a team and their best kid went on to Belmont. I think their second best kid went on to Stonehill. And obviously they were way more talented than us, but I just kind of had it going this night. I think I had like 27 points in the first half. And we really played well as a team and we ended up upsetting them.

And for like, our school where like we had all, like, we had like three division three guys and they had a couple division one guys to go beat them. It was just like a big moment for our program and big moment for our school. And it was just like we ended up losing in the playoffs a couple weeks later.

But that to us was our championship game. And it was just a moment that we always think about. And it was just a cool memory at the time to just go knock out a Goliath when we when knock out Goliath, when we felt like David,

[00:08:17] Mike Klinzing: Well hey, if somebody’s putting up 27 in the first half, that’s pretty good.

[00:08:21] Shiva Senthil: I can shoot, like, not with any defense, but if you zone me in high school, I can make some shots. All right, well, there you go.

[00:08:30] Mike Klinzing: All right, well, there you go. Hey, not many guys get a chance to score 27 and a half. So that’s, that’s, that’s pretty solid. All right, so as you start to look at the college recruiting process and you start thinking about making a decision about where you want to go, just talk a little bit about your college decision, how you went about it, and sort of what that process was like for you.

[00:08:48] Shiva Senthil: Yeah, so in high school like I said, I played on a mediocre team, but I think we kind of overperformed expectations both years, I think I had a really, really good high school coach and he did a really good job of just getting the most out of our talents and just kind of putting us in positions where we can succeed.

So my numbers were always pretty good in high school, and we won more games than people thought in a really, really good league. And so I was recruited by most of the New York Division threes. So I was recruited by like the Suny, the Liberty Leagues, the Empire eight schools, and. The way I kind of ended up and one of those schools was Hartwick, which is was at that time coached by Todd McGuinnes, who’s now the head coach at Case Western Reserve.

And that’s actually where I ended up. And the reason I kind of ended up at Hartwick was I really bought into what Coach McGuinness vision was. And for him, he was a young coach and he saw potential in Hartwick. And he thought Hartwick could be a conference championship winning program, a program that can play in the NCAA tournament.

And because in high school I never really experienced winning at a really high level I wanted to go somewhere where I knew we had a chance to win and I knew we had a chance to compete in the NCAA tournament. And with that, combined with kind of the geographic factors and kind of the academic factors of the school made Hartwick kind of the perfect choice for me.

But it all started because I really just bought in on Coach McGuinness vision, and I just wanted to be a part of a high level winning program. That was the most important thing to me.

[00:10:20] Mike Klinzing: From a school standpoint, what were you thinking about in terms of career or major when you first went to school?

[00:10:25] Shiva Senthil: Yeah. So when I first entered college, I thought I was like, at least in my mind, I thought I was going to go into law school.

But I think if you were to ask my parents or any of my family members or friends from when I was a kid, I think they would’ve told you that I was definitely going to at least try coaching in some way because like I was talking, I actually just, over Christmas break, I was hanging out with my brother and I was talking to him about like, if we were talking about like how I got into coaching and my path and everything like that.

And he was like, Hey man, I knew you were going to go to coaching when you were 14 years old because all these other kids, they were playing Madden and they were playing like my player mode and you’re the only dude I’ve ever saw by N F L coach and play the coach mode on it. So he was like, you were going to do that.

And so even though I thought I was going to go to law school until my senior year I think my family had kind of a hunch, like I would try at least try it out when I was younger.

[00:11:27] Mike Klinzing: That’s funny. I mean, there’s always two paths that typically you hear. Of all the interviews that I’ve done, most people fall into one of two categories.

Either it’s the person who was eight and was drawing plays on a napkin and knew that they wanted to coach from that time. Or there’s also the path where somebody’s playing and they get done. All of a sudden they look around, they’re like, what the game? The game is gone. I can’t do anything. And maybe I go in, I get a business job, and all of a sudden I’m like, yeah, this stinks.

I want to get back. And all the basketball and they get back into coaching. So yours is almost a hybrid of that, where maybe people around you knew, but you weren’t really sure, or you didn’t really know, or you didn’t really see that directly, that that was going to be the direction that you went. So talk a little bit about your experience as a player at Hartwick and maybe what you learned as we think about moving forward here with you as a coach.

Maybe what you learned from Coach McGuinness during your time with him.

[00:12:19] Shiva Senthil: So personally I was not a very good player in college. Like I just had some flaws in my game and we were really good and I played behind some really good players, but, I really, really love my experience in college because one, I wanted to be a part of a program that won games and we absolutely won a ton of games.

Like we made three NCAA tournaments in my four years and my sophomore year. I think we started off the years 14 and 0, and so I played on some good teams and I really really had a strong relationship with Coach McGuinness, and that for me gave me a really good experience, even though I personally wasn’t a good player myself.

And when I went into my senior year, actually, I had a knee injury and that kind of combined with the fact that I knew I was never going to be a really big on the court contributor at the college level. I talked to Coach McGuinness and he allowed me to be a student assistant for him.

And while working for him as a student assistant, I was really able to understand like what makes him such a good coach. And for me, I think what he does as well as any coach I’ve ever been around, and it’s something that I try to do with my players, is rather than just being stuck in, Hey, this is how I want a player, this is how I envision basketball being played, he does such a good job of kind of catering the team to allow his best players to be the best versions of themself. And his always, he always talked about like, Hey, if we can’t make our best players good, we’re not very good coaches. And for me, that’s kind of always stuck. And to this day, I’m always trying to figure out, Hey, what are the strengths of our players?

What do our players do really well and how do we maximize that? And that’s something I absolutely directly got from Coach McGuinness.

[00:14:04] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, I love that. I think that’s when you look at and think about what makes somebody a good coach, I think obviously everybody has different differing levels of talent and clearly the more talent you have, the easier is to win games.

But by the same token, I think the best coaches get the most out of their players and they try their best to get the most out of them and do whatever they can to put them in the best position to be able to succeed. And I think when you do that, that’s the mark to me of somebody who really knows what they’re doing and does a great job as a coach.

So when you get that opportunity to work with Coach McGuinness, you obviously go from being a player to that relationship now changes where you’re part of the staff and you kind of get to go behind the scenes and take a look at, well, hey, what is coaching really all about? Do you remember if there were some things that surprised you as you kind of got behind the curtain and got to know Coach McGinnis and sort of know what went on?

Yeah. Rather from a player perspective, but more from a coach perspective.

[00:15:04] Shiva Senthil: Yeah. I mean, the biggest shock right away was kind of how many hard decisions you had to make and how many conversations you had to have with players. And when you’re a player, you don’t necessarily understand like why coaches are making certain decisions.

As a player sometimes, you’re kind of in this Blinded tunnel where you’re really focused on like, Hey, what does a coach think about me? And a lot of times, some players and like this isn’t always the case, but a lot of, sometimes, sometimes players are like, Hey, coach doesn’t like me, coach doesn’t like this, or whatever.

But one of the things I really notice when I start working as a coach under him is, hey, he really wants to make every player happy. He would love if he could play everyone, but he has to do what’s best for the team. And even though like sometimes like he would love to play someone because they’re a great kid and he likes being with them and they do all the right things, but sometimes you just have to play the kid that’s going to help you win games.

And that’s that internal struggle, those conversations in the office, those really those are some things I just never anticipated because you don’t see that side as a player. You don’t realize coaches go through all those conversations and it’s just something that’s absolutely necessary. And it really kind of opened my eyes to the coaching profession.

[00:16:22] Mike Klinzing: What did you love about it right away, like as soon as you get in there and you’re like, all right, I’m transitioning from player to coach. What part of coaching right away did you take to?

[00:16:30] Shiva Senthil: Yeah, I loved the relationships that you can build with players.  I loved how players just kind of, if you can have strong relationships with them, and I obviously did, especially some of the upper classmates, because they’re my literal classmates, right. But if you can have relationships with them that they would trust you and they would go ask you different questions and as an assistant, like they would come to you. Even the younger guys, like they would come to me as an assistant and ask me different basketball things, talk to me about their personal lives. And I love building that relationship aspect of it. And that’s something I still enjoy to this day.

And then the other thing I still really enjoy and this was probably my favorite part of my entire senior year, was coach was really good at kind of involving everyone in game plans. And obviously as a student assistant, I didn’t have much input, but I was there watching film with them. I was seeing what the coaching staff was talking about.

And for me just that puzzle aspect of kind of figuring out a game plan, figuring out what to do against an opponent to put your team in the best position to succeed. I love that aspect of coaching and to this day, I love watching film, I love breaking down film. I love trying to figure out how do we beat our opponent, put ourselves in the best position to succeed and it’s just like a puzzle to me and I love that.

[00:17:54] Mike Klinzing: How much film are you watching of other teams and other programs to kind of get ideas? Do you do a lot of that in the off season?

[00:18:03] Shiva Senthil: Yeah we do a ton of that. Just today actually me and my assistants were watching an Arizona game because when we were at the Final four, we watched Tommy Lloyd do a clinic and we kind of loved some of the concepts he was talking about. So we were watching a bunch of Arizona film on Synergy trying to figure out like what are the different things they do, how they get into different actions.

But yeah, we try to do that a couple times a week of watching either division three programs, division two programs that we think are really highly up or we think they do similar stuff to what we want to do or even high major programs, NBA teams, like we try to soak in as much film as possible. Like, we always tell the players, just like we want them to work on their game.

We want them to work on their shot, do work hard in the off season. We have to do the exact same thing and continue to improve as coaches and continue to improve what we want to do on the floor.

[00:18:51] Mike Klinzing: So much easier than for us old guys. Man, we used to have to do that on VHS tape and

[00:18:55] Shiva Senthil: Yeah. Oh my god. Synergy’s a game changer.

[00:18:58] Mike Klinzing: I mean, hitting the rewind button. Yeah. It’s amazing how easy it is to be able to watch stuff and pull things up. It’s just crazy. You told somebody who was a coach in the eighties and nineties the way things are now, and they oof man, put them in a time machine they’d have, they wouldn’t even recognize what watching film looks, looks like I bet.

Looks like today. So, alright, so you graduate, you got a degree in business. Was there any thought of going and getting a regular job? Or was that point you were sold on coaching and started looking for coaching jobs?

[00:19:24] Shiva Senthil: Yeah, I was sold on coaching in like the first semester of my senior year when I was that student assistant.

I knew this is what I wanted to do. At that point I was part of some really good teams. I played I was a coaching, I was part of a coaching staff of a team that was making the NCAA tournament. We were really good at the point, and for me, I couldn’t envision getting out of basketball and not at least giving it a shot.

So yeah, it, going into the real world, going into getting a nine to five job at that point was never even in the question for me. I was at least going to give it a chance.

[00:20:01] Mike Klinzing: I can completely understand, so I think I’ve told this story on the podcast, but I’ll share it with you real quick. So I graduated and I had a degree in business administration, same as you.

And to be honest, I had never, I was one of those people that I had never really thought about coaching. At all, never even crossed my mind. And then when I went out to get a job, and my parents were both teachers, so my dad was a professor at Cleveland State, my mom taught second grade. And so I had never seen anybody work in the summer.

So the summer I graduated, I went and had some interviews and I remember I had this interview with Nestle, the big like international food company. And at some point they’re like, I think I went for a second interview. And they’re like, Hey, we want to hire you and you know you’re going to report to work on July 1st.

And I remember. Wait, I have to put on a suit and go to work when it’s like 90 degrees in July. Cause I had never seen anybody work in the summertime. My dad, maybe once in a while would teach a summer school class or whatever, and I’m like, yeah, I think I’m going to go back to school and see if I can get into coaching and maybe become a, maybe, maybe become a teacher.

And I guess I had already thought about maybe trying to go and be a ga but the year that I graduated was when all division one schools cut from one, from two GA’s to one. So everybody kind of had them staggered. So there was basically no jobs anywhere in the entire country.

And so anyway, so that was my long story into how I got to how I got to teaching and coaching. So talk a little about your first experience and you go to Michigan, Dearborn, is that correct? Correct. Okay. Tell us a little bit about how you got there and how that opportunity came to you.

[00:21:29] Shiva Senthil: Yeah, so after graduating, I wanted to go get a coaching position.

I didn’t know anything about the business outside of like what it was physically to coach on the floor at the time. So I was just on hoop dirt applying to every single job I can. Like, I just wanted to get a coaching position and coach Langley at the University of Michigan, Dearborn was the first coach to kind of get back to me and he offered me, it was essentially a volunteer position, but I was so excited to just get a coaching position that I jumped aboard and I hopped on his coaching staff and looking back, it was interesting because it was, I knew nothing about the I level. I knew nothing about moving out to the Midwest, living in Detroit, but I just wanted to coach so bad that for me, if whoever was the first person to offer me a coaching position, I was going to take it. So that’s kind of how I ended up at Dearborn.

[00:22:23] Mike Klinzing: And so you ended up making a ton of money and living in apartment. Is that how it went?

[00:22:27] Shiva Senthil: Exactly, exactly. So much money that I had to work to make ends meet.  I was like a branch manager, a shift manager at the local Detroit Y M C A. And I had to work from 5:00 AM to noon every single morning.

And then afternoon at noon. I would run over to the basketball office and try to get ready and do everything we had to do on the basketball court before practice in the evening. But yeah, those were some long days for sure.

[00:22:58] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. I mean, I think anybody who’s in that position, you, we’ve talked to so many people that have gone this similar path to what you’ve gone on and just they’re working for free, you’re volunteering, or you’re making a very minimum, or you’re a ga or whatever it might be.

And yeah, you have to put a lot of time in and do a lot of work. But I think one of the things that universally guys have told us is that those first experiences, when, again, you’re young, you’re single, you got lots of time, and you can kind of run on that level of energy that it takes to be able to follow the schedule that you’re talking about.

You learn so much in those experiences. So what do you remember from that year that something that you take that is still part of, well, who you are today?

[00:23:39] Shiva Senthil: aYeah, I mean, like the biggest thing I learned, and this is both from my experiences and coaching, that team was just the element of kind of resiliency.

And I think like, as a coach, it’s really important. Like obviously like the profession is up and down, like we’re relying on 18 year old kids, you have to be resilient, you have to be able to just get up the next morning, just do your thing. And as a coach, as a program, I think Coach Langley did such a good job of kind of instilling resiliency, toughness, instilling that culture within the team.

To kind of give you a little bit of background, like before Coach Langley got to Michigan, Dearborn, they never had a winning season ever in program history. And, and within three years he got that program into the NAIA National title and that first year, We were taking our bumps for sure. Like we had our struggles.

I think we started off the season oh and seven, but all he would talk about is resiliency. All he would talking about talk about is a process and getting up the next day and just making sure that we’re continuing to just do our best, continue to raise the standard. And to this day, like that’s still stuff I’m trying to bring to over.

I’m still trying to talk to our guys about, because I think it’s important not just on the basketball court but in life. And that year really was a year where I kind of, everything about that year was just about being resilient to me.

[00:25:01] Mike Klinzing: I think when you talk about being able to rebuild a program, to me that’s a skill that I think it takes a special kind of skill set to be able to come in because obviously it’s not just changing what goes on on the basketball floor, but you’re also talking about changing the culture and trying to put that in place. And as we get to your experience at Oberlin this year, we’ll get to that part of it, I think. But to me, being able to turn around a program that doesn’t have that winning tradition, I always think that the guys that can do that, it’s just a special skillset that I don’t think everybody, I don’t think everybody has.

And so for you to be able to learn that right away and learn it early it has to be a huge advantage. You’re there for one. And then you go to SUNY Purchase, talk a little bit about that. Get to go back east.

[00:25:44] Shiva Senthil: Yeah. And that was honestly the number one reason I took the position is I wanted to kind of get back to the division three level.

I love the division three level. I think it’s such a pure form of basketball, such a pure form of coaching, and I got a chance to kind of be closer to family, closer to some friends. And so, yeah, I took the job at SUNY Purchase and it’s funny, like every coach I’ve worked for, I think I’m unique in the sense that I worked for so many different coaches and I moved around a lot in the profession in a really short time.

But every single program, every single coach I work for taught me something different. And as SUNY purchase, it was an interesting position. Like the program had been wildly, wildly successful on the floor,we played them when I was at Hartwick. They beat us in the NCAA tournament twice in my career and they beat us up pretty badly.

They were really talented. And then the year before I got to purchase, they kind of had some off course stuff. They had a coaching change. And when my boss, Kyle Martin, his job was to not only kind of continue the success of the basketball program, but was kind of clean up the academic side, clean up the presence our guys had in the school and within the culture of the institution.

So what I learned by, from Kyle Martin is not just how to build a successful basketball program, but how to address tougher issues, how to build your team’s reputation within the campus community, how to get your guys to care about more than just winning or losing. And at a place where that was such an important part of the hiring process.

It was just really good for me to learn how to kind of build a program and run a program that’s successful, not just on the basketball court, but often as well.

[00:27:25] Mike Klinzing: So what did that look like and what does that look like? Let’s take it, let’s jump ahead. As you try to institute that in your program when you’re a head coach, what does that look like?

What’d you learn during that year? And then what have you applied to your situation currently at Oberlin?

[00:27:37] Shiva Senthil: Yeah, so one of the things I learned that year, and we try to talk to our players about this every single day, is there needs to be a championship mindset. There needs to be a standard of excellence in every single situation you are in, and we talk to our guys about how if we’re going to build a championship program here at Oberlin, it’s not just about, hey, getting on the court and making more shots in the other team. That making more shots in the other team comes as a result of the process of approaching every single situation you do to the best of your ability.

So for us, when we talk to our guys about their life. When we talk about school, the biggest thing we talk about aren’t necessarily the results of what they’re doing. Not necessarily their grades, but Hey, did you give everything you have in this situation? Did you try to put yourself in a position to succeed?

And sometimes you don’t. But if you didn’t, then we try to figure out why that happened, why you didn’t put yourself in a position to succeed. And we try to make sure that that doesn’t happen moving forward and all. The biggest thing we try to do year one is make sure our guys understood the mentality of being a champion and make sure they understood that they have to approach every single situation with the standard of excellence.

[00:28:53] Mike Klinzing: What does that look like in terms of. An action that you want to see from your guys, whether that’s when they’re on campus, whether they’re in class, whether that’s on the practice floor, in the locker room. Just gimme a concrete thing that you want your guys to do, that when you talk about, Hey, we want to compete at a championship level, we want to do everything at this championship level, what’s an example of that that’s kind of feet on the ground?

[00:29:15] Shiva Senthil: Sure. So I’ll give you a couple different examples. So academically that means. If they have like a test, are you making sure they’re preparing for that test? And let’s just not make sure you’re  cramming it in the day before the test. Let’s prepare ourselves. Everyone gets syllabuses. Let’s make sure that you plan out your study schedule, you’re organizing yourself.

Make sure you’re staying on top of your work so when the test comes, you’re absolutely in position to succeed. Now, the test might not go your way, but in the end of the day, you can say, Hey, I worked hard and I put myself in this position to succeed. That’s all you can do on the court.

It’s exact same thing like we tell our guys all the time, Hey, you can’t control whether shots are going to go in and out. You just can’t, but what you can control is how hard you play. To become a really good shooter. What you can control is how hard you play every single time you’re on the floor. If you can control how good a teammate you are, how you can interact with other people on the floor and off the floor.

So those are the things that we really try to put into our guys is, Hey, let’s figure out this process. And I’m a big believer that if you can figure out the process to be successful, then the success is going to come. Like if our guys work really hard at being good shooters, if our guys get on the gun and shoot a ton and take game shots and really focus on it, they will become better shooters.

It’s inevitable. And I think that has to do with every single thing they do.

[00:30:44] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, absolutely. I think the process piece of it is something that when you start to look at what you want to do as a coach, It really makes such a difference when you have somebody who’s coaching the process instead of always coaching the outcome.

And you could watch and we, you and I talked a little about AAU basketball before we jumped on here, but you can go and watch AAU basketball or even high school basketball and you’ll see examples where player does everything right and the outcome isn’t good and coach gets mad, or conversely everything goes wrong.

And for some reason the outcome turns out to be good and coach is all excited. And I think ultimately what you’re doing there with your players is you’re teaching them those bad habits that you don’t want to instill versus if you talk about the process, yeah, you can play great defense and sometimes Guy just makes a great shot, right?

But you still have to look at, well, how’s the process of what we did to get there? Were we in the right places? Were we making the right calls? Were we communicating all those things? And sometimes again, guys are going to score or sometimes a. Misses. Even though we run the offense and do everything Exactly, we make the right reads and it just doesn’t go in.

So I think that process piece of it to me is hugely important when you start talking about what you want to do in terms of building the right habits for your guys and building those championship habits. So that to me is something that makes a ton of sense. When you start looking at, especially taking over a new program like you did this past season, talk about your two other assistant coaching stops before you end up getting your first head job.

First at Clarkson and then at the University of Chicago. Obviously at the University of Chicago, you have a similar situation to what you have at Oberlin in term terms of academics. So just talk a little bit about those two stops.

[00:32:19] Shiva Senthil: Yeah. So Clarkson and the University of Chicago were great for me because they were kind of my first two introductions into the kind of this high academic realm and I absolutely fell in love with this realm of basketball.

I think our guys have kind of the right perspective. All of our guys are here for the right reasons. Basketball’s really important to them, but they understand they also want a really good education. Our guys are for being college kids are really mature. I feel like I’m coaching adults for the most part.

And I absolutely fell in love with this level now at Clarkson. Jeff Gorsky, he’s one of my best friends still in the business from him. I really. Kind of how to run a good practice. He’s one of the most organized guys that I’ve ever met in my entire life. He’s really, really efficient with this time.

And I thought we did a really good job at that at Clarkson, just making sure that we were really prepared. We didn’t waste a second of practice time. Every single thing was planned out. Every drill had a purpose. Our guys were flying around the practice floor, and I thought he did a really good job getting his guys prepared.

And then my final assistant stop was kind of the end all, be all to how to run an incredible program. Coach McGrath, unlike the other coaches I worked for, who were kind of new at all of their staffs, coach McGrath was an institution at the University of Chicago. I think he had been there 25 years when I had gotten there.

He’s made elite eights. He’s made sweet sixteens. And like from the University of Chicago, the biggest thing I kind of learned was how to run this incredible program. Like Coach McGrath had everything under his thumb, whether it was alumni giving Day, whether it was making sure our professors in the school knew athletics existed.

It was every single thing. Coach McGrath knew, had a way, he had a process. He understood how to run this program at a bigger level. And to me, that’s still stuff that I try to do and I’m not anywhere as good as he is, like he’s so good at just running the program at a big picture level.

But for me it was like the final thing I needed to learn. Like I got like through all these different coaching styles, I learned different elements of recruiting, different elements of running a practice, different elements of dealing with players. But that was kind of a bow time, like, all right, this is the macro level of how to run a really, really successful program.

So I was really thankful for all my coaching stops I had as an assistant. I’m really close with all the head coaches I work for still, and I think all of them kind of taught me different aspects of being a coach and I don’t know if other people have the same experiences I have working for all these different coaches who have different styles, but I know for me it’s made me a better coach, I think.

[00:35:03] Mike Klinzing: When did you start looking around for head coaching jobs? Was that just during that season at the University of Chicago? Had you looked before? Did you feel like you were ready? Obviously you go and you get the job at SUNY Canton, but just tell me a little bit about when you first started looking.

[00:35:17] Shiva Senthil: Yeah, so it was during that year at the University of Chicago I kind of until the University of Chicago, I never really felt I was ready yet.

I thought I was getting better and better, but I’d never thought I could run my own program. And then working for Coach McGrath, I kind of had a feeling after that year that like, hey, I don’t know if I’m ready yet. But I think I’m going to try at least, I think I’m going to position where I can give it a running try.

And so it was after that season working at the University of Chicago where I really start applying for head coaching positions. What was the interview process? Yeah. So I applied that year for kind of every small college division three job in the Northeast. And I got two interviews, and one of them was SUNY Canton, and then I got SUNY Canton job.

And I luckily I use Chad O’Donnell.  I’m one of his clients and he did a really good job preparing me for the interview. But I still remember the first time I talked to him, he does a really good job preparing his clients to succeed in the interview process.

But the first time I spoke with them he, we did like a mock interview and he goes, that was the worst thing I’ve ever heard. He was like, you are not going to get this job. But he got me better, we worked that in. I try to drill myself, I treated it like I was a player where I would sit down in front of a mirror and ask myself questions and answer over and over and over again.

I got myself to a point where I felt comfortable in the interview process and I really connected with the people at Canton because Canton and Clarkson are actually 10 minutes from each other. So I had a familiarity with the area. It was similar type of people and I just connected well with them and I had a really good interview process and that’s kind of how I ended up at Canton

[00:37:10] Mike Klinzing: In that original interview with Chad, who we’ve had on the podcast, who’s great by the way, but what was bad about your answers?

I’m just curious, like, what made you a bad interviewee at that point?

[00:37:22] Shiva Senthil: Yeah. Chad will tell you when I’m nervous, I can get very robotic. So he was always like, Hey, man, talk like a person, you look like you’re just reading a text. So, that was the biggest thing.

It was just getting comfortable. I was good at understanding what I needed to say and I always had good thought. Like I think what you’re trying to say is good, but he goes, you have to deliver it in a way that’s presentable.

And I think like early on especially in my first head coaching interview, my first real interview process I just wasn’t ready for that yet because I wanted the job so bad that I was just kind of nervous and I was kind of just almost recite it was a text rather than having a conversation with someone.

[00:38:17] Mike Klinzing: Yeah. You have to kind of go through it and be able to be yourself, for lack of a better way of saying it. I know that if I go back and listen to some of my first podcasts, Jason, and I’ll do this sometimes and go back and listen to me, you’re like, oh God, it’s terrible. Like, who listened to these things?

And obviously over time you get better and you’re still always trying to grow and improve. But I think the interview process is sort of the same way. You have to get kind of comfortable with the kind of questions they’re going to ask, and then you have to let your true personality shine through and be the person who you are and be the kind of coach that you’re going to be.

And that way they can kind of see the real you and that’s how you end up eventually I think conquering that and being able to get the job. So you transition from a multi-time assistant coach to a head coach. What do you remember about the first week or two on that job? Trying to figure out, okay, now I’m the head coach and yeah, I just watched Coach McGrath do all this program stuff like you described, but now.

He’s not doing that stuff, I have to do that stuff. So just what do you remember about that initial couple weeks on the job and what that was like?

[00:39:22] Shiva Senthil: Yeah, so the first couple weeks were absolutely a whirlwind. I think you can you can work as an assistant for a long time, but until you’re a head coach, like you just don’t know what’s going to be thrown at you.

And so the second I got there in the job, I was trying to do a million things at once and it was just kind of a whirlwind. And I still remember, I had a conversation with Jeff Gorsky at that time because Jeff Gorsky is still one of my good friends. And he coached at Clarkson, like I said, which is 10 minutes from SUNY Canton.

And he was just like, focus on doing a couple things really well right now. Don’t focus on just running this huge program, focus on doing a couple things really, really well. And then from there, just start building. And I thought that was really good advice for me at the time because then I really tried, I remember sitting down at my office and I really thought out like, Hey, what’s really, really important at this institution at that time?

And for me, that was one I wanted to connect with all of my players. So I ended up calling every single one of my players. It was over the summer really connecting with them, talking to them about their experiences. And I really tried to hit the road recruiting and because it was a place where we could still kind of get in transfers, we can get kids in late there.

And then I try to just make myself known. Campus and just having those three tangible things that I knew I could do that I knew I can actually like get, get work done towards that helped me kind of get moving in the process of becoming a head coach and help me get ready and, and then from there it was just different things came up and even to this day as a head coach, like different new things pop up every single day.

I’m really happy I had that conversation with Coach Gorsky just to kind of settle me down because I do remember the first couple days are absolute whirlwinds and I’m sure they are for a lot of young coaches.

[00:41:12] Mike Klinzing: I love that because I equate that to being on the practice floor where you can watch and you can pick out a million different things during a practice that you’re like, oh, I’d like to fix that.

Or, oh, we have to get better at that. Or, oh, we can do that. And then if you end up not focusing on anything, you end up doing a hundred things and you don’t do any of them well versus if you kind of come into your practices with an idea of, Hey, here’s the three most important things that we have to work on or you come into a season with, these are the three things that are.

Non-negotiable that we have to get done. It’s sort of the same thing what you’re describing where, yeah, you came into a new program and I’m sure that I can’t even put a number on how many different things you probably wanted to touch and get started on and hey, I have to do this and I have to do that. But obviously you can’t do all of them.

And certainly if you’re going to try, you’re not going to do them very well. So that’s great advice to be able Exactly. Come in and I have to work on, these are the three most important things, or these are the three things that are most important right now, and that’s what I have to focus on. And then you knock those out and then you can move on to something else.

Exactly. And I think that’s a really, really good mindset when you think about being a head coach and you think about what it was like when you were an assistant, and clearly there’s a difference in the mentality. There’s a difference in the responsibility when you’re an assistant coach and the team wins or the team loses that one loss doesn’t go on, your record goes on the head coach’s record.

And so I think that as an assistant coach, it’s oftentimes you look at the head coach, you’re like, man, why? Why are you doing that? Or why? Why don’t you do this? And then I think when you get in that head coaching chair, you realize that there’s some things that maybe as an assistant you look at that seem like they’re kind of easy.

But when you are in the head coaching position, you realize they’re a little bit more difficult. Is there anything that you can point to? That little story that I just told kind of rings a bell for you of something that you thought as an assistant that you’re like, oh man, come on. Why isn’t he doing that?

And now you realize as a head coach, well maybe there was a reason why.

[00:43:07] Shiva Senthil: It’s so funny you said that because when I was an assistant under Coach McGrath, I was like, I thought like it, he’ll still make fun of me for it. He was like, I had an answer for everything. I thought we would watch film and I’m like, coach, we just have to do this.

And we got it. And I remember my first season as a head coach, we’re doing game prep for the first time and how to guard a certain action. We had a couple different options and I was like, I have no clue. I don’t know what to do right now. And I called Coach McGrath and I was like, coach, what would you do here?

And he goes the irony is incredible right now because this is the first time you don’t know what you don’t know the answer to. That’s awesome.

[00:43:49] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, that is funny, but I think it’s so true. I mean, I just think that as an assistant, you’re sitting there and you’re like, man, it seems obvious.

Or man, there’s this, and then you don’t necessarily realize that there’s some other things at play when Yep. Head coaches make decisions that the assistant coaches just don’t have to take into account that you certainly do as a head coach. When you think about the way that you want your teams to play, obviously as a first time head coach, you’ve taken things, as you talked about, from all the different stops that you’ve been, from all the different coaches that you’ve had the opportunity to work with, different playing styles, different ways of building their team.

Where were you in terms of sort of your style of play, how you wanted to play your, your overall coaching philosophy as you first get that job, were you pretty confident in this is what I want to do, or were you still kind of like, Hey, I have to, I have to figure this out as I’m going along, kind of look at my personnel or just where were you in terms of style of play and philosophy?

[00:44:49] Shiva Senthil: Yeah, so I had kind of some big picture ideas. The one thing I always believed in is I thought in order to win big games or in order to be consistently successful, you had to be tough, you had to be physical, and you had to be good defensively. And offensively I wanted to use some kind of ball screen stuff, but because I worked for Todd and I worked for different coaches that were kind of big on just maximizing your player’s talent I didn’t have a set view of what that looked like. So for me, I came in and I had an idea of how to work on defense. I had an idea of  how to be a really good rebounding team, how to emphasize that. I had an idea how to kind of build a good practice plan. But it wasn’t until I really started diving into SUNY Canton and diving into our personnel that I realized like, Hey, we have really, really good post players. We have some guys that are good with the ball, but we may not be the best shooting team in the world, so let’s just kind of pound it high low, try to figure out weird spacing where it’d be tough to help for us and try to play high low basketball. But for me, that year we won the conference championship and won.

My good friends coached in that league already. He watched our conference championship game. He’s like, Hey, you guys were really good, but you brought basketball back 50 years. Because we walked, wait, we played two posts. Walked it up the floor too, played high low basketball for 40 minutes. And it’s not like I came in, I was like, Hey, That’s what we’re going to do coming into it.

But just, we had a seven foot one kid who was awesome in that league. We had another six four man who was awesome. And I just decided, Hey, let’s play both of these guys to get together, and it’s going to be really hard to guard. And we just did that. But with that, I always knew I wanted to be a team that’s going to be really good on the boards, really good defensively, and just tough and physical.

And that’s kind of the standard. Even today at Oberlin, our personnel is wildly different than that Canton team. But in terms of style of playing, in terms of identity, those are things that we still talk about to this day, is just that physicality, just that toughness, just that defensive mentality approaching every single game.

[00:46:50] Mike Klinzing: After your three years at Canton, you come to Oberlin, obviously a really high academic institution for people who aren’t aware, but tell me a little bit about the why behind coming to Oberlin.

[00:47:03] Shiva Senthil: Yeah, so one, I always wanted to get back into high academic basketball, for me the Oberlin and the beliefs of Oberlin’s, the institution, the degree that students get here really do kind of line up with everything I believe what college basketball should be. What Higher education should be. So Oberlin. When the job opened up, I already kind of knew a little bit about the institution and kind of about high academic basketball working at Chicago and Clarkson.

So that already intrigued me. And then when I started digging through Oberlin, looking at and going through the interview process and talking to the administration here and talking to different coaches, what really, really made me excited for this job was I saw an incredible amount of potential. Obviously the league is incredible.

There’s so much history in the league, there’s so many good teams in the league, and it’s a league where if you can win the league, you can compete with everyone. And even though that could be kind frightening at times, like the fact that Oberlin has so much potential, I think it’s kind of in this new era of athletics where there’s an emphasis in athletics.

We have resources now we can get the type of kids we need to win games, all of that kind of sold me on how this is when you combine that with the type of institution, the beliefs of Oberlin, with it being such a great academic institution. For me, I felt like it was an absolute home run of a fit. And to be honest, like I’m 11 months in, almost a year in now, and I feel exactly the same.

For me, this is the perfect fit as an institution and as a basketball program for me.

[00:48:47] Mike Klinzing: What kind of questions did you ask them during your interview process to help you to get a better understanding of making sure that it was the right fit for you? Cause obviously, as you just said, you’re doing some research or learning more about the school itself, you’re learning about the basketball program. What were some questions that you had for them?

[00:49:03] Shiva Senthil: Yeah, the biggest thing I had for them is I wanted to know about kind of the history of Oberlin and athletics and what was their thoughts and why some teams haven’t been as successful and why there wasn’t a ton of N CACs success orbit and what they’re doing to address that.

And I just kind of wanted to hear their perspective and I wanted to see the changes that have been made in recent years. And when I talked to our athletic director, when I talked to different coaches, when I talked to our head of admissions, a lot of the things that I thought made Oberlin a really, really challenging job in the past. I think they were actively working on resolving them and while keeping the institutional core and institutional mission of what Oberlin really is, and for me, because I was able to kind of get those answers, I felt comfortable that this is a place that not only can you provide students the really good education, but you can actually win at a really high level if you do it the right way.

And for me, so it was all about asking about kind of the past and how they kind of viewed how they wanted to move forward in building a high level athletic program.

[00:50:14] Mike Klinzing: When you come in, and obviously you have guys that are already a part of the program that you didn’t bring in, and so they’re having to adjust to, okay, we got a new coach.

What’s this guy going to be like? What’s he all about? Tell me a little bit about some of your first contact. The returning players and what those conversations look like from your perspective, what you’re trying to get across to the guys that had been there before.

[00:50:38] Shiva Senthil: Yeah, so one of the luxuries I had when I got Oberlin was school was still in session.

And that was a little bit different than SUNY Canton because I got the job at Canton in July, so I had to make calls over the phone and because I got the job in April, I was able to meet with every single one of our returning players face to face. And my biggest thing was I just wanted to kind of talk to them about their experiences.

I wanted to see what they liked, I wanted to see things that they didn’t necessarily appreciate that happened in the past. I wanted to see kind of what their expectations were and I just kind of wanted to see how much they cared about basketball, how much they cared about success and so I just met with each of them individually. And what kind of really at that point, made me feel comfortable with the decision I made, leaving a winning program at SUNY Canton and coming to Oberlin was, I had a conversation with one of our rising seniors at that time.

He just finished his junior year and they hadn’t had a coach for four, six weeks at the time. And I was like, Hey. What have you guys been doing in the spring? What have you guys been doing in the off season? And he pulled out a notebook and he gave me the exact plan of exactly what they’re doing.

He’s like, Hey, coach, we are lifting four times a week. We’re playing pick up these are the scheduled hours where the gym is open. I’m making sure guys are getting in the gym, getting shots up and right there I knew our guys really cared about being successful on the basketball court.

I knew like, hey, even though there might have not been a history of tremendous success in the past, we had guys that really wanted to win and we had really good guys who wanted to be leaders on the floor. And just having that in the program when you’re walking in and you have guys that are already intrinsically motivated makes you just feel that much better.

And that’s when I felt really comfortable that I made the right choice. And that’s held true to this day. We have really intrinsically motivated guys and obviously at the division three level where you don’t have a ton of time on the off-season with your guys. That’s really important when you’re trying to rebuild and build a program from the ground up.

We absolutely have that and something we look forward to when we recruit guys now, but it’s day one. With those conversations when I was really trying to get to know and build relationships, that’s something I found out right away.

[00:53:01] Mike Klinzing: Yeah. To be able to have that in place already as you take the job, man, that’s a huge bonus because clearly I think anybody who’s coaching at the division three level, like you said, there’s limited access to your players in the off-season. You guys are getting eight days now…

[00:53:16] Shiva Senthil: I’m so excited for that.

[00:53:16] Mike Klinzing: I know every D three guy we talk to is like, man, the eight days is going to be great. Everybody’s super excited, but clearly again, there’s a whole portion of the off-season where it’s up to your guys, right?

It’s up to your leaders, it’s up to your upperclassmen. It’s up to the guys to get in the gym themselves and to get in the weight room and to do all the things that you’re describing. So to already have somebody in place, or multiple guys in place that are kind of leading that charge, I’m sure was invaluable to you.

Another piece that you had to get in place was your coaching staff. So just talk a little bit about what that’s like as a head coach trying to put together a staff and just how you went about that process.

[00:53:51] Shiva Senthil: Yeah, so I got really lucky. I have two assistant coaches and I think they’re tremendous. Like I always say, like they could be head coaches right now.

I think at this level, having two guys with the experiences they have with the, with the places they’ve been as coaches and the things they’ve done as coaches, I think I’m incredibly, incredibly fortunate. My one assistant I’ve known him since he was seven years old. He was my little brother’s best friend.

He actually went to Hartwick. We actually just missed each other by a year, but he played at Hartwick too and I’m kind of seeing him progress in the coaching career. He was a GA at a division one school. He was coaching division one junior college basketball for a while. And for him, he’s a division three guy by heart and he kind of just missed kind of what Division three basketball was all about and the purity of the recruiting there and the purity of kind of not having to worry about your guys’ academics and just coach basketball, we coach basketball and he wanted to kind of get back to that. And I know how much he worked and I know how good a coach he is. So when he wanted the job, it was a no-brainer for me. So that was my first hire. And then my other assistant, Nate it was funny. He has so much experience. He was a division one assistant at Sacramento State for 10 years.

He knows so much about basketball and they had a coaching change in Sacramento and he’s originally from Toledo and he wanted to give small college basketball a try while getting closer to family back in Ohio. He emailed me and he was like, Hey, I’m looking to get back to Ohio.

Do you have an open coaching position? And luckily enough I did. So I talked to him on the phone and immediately we kind of connected. I thought we believed in the same things in terms of like macro level philosophy. So I ended up hiring him and this staff is so awesome to have because of how experienced these guys are and because of how good a coaches they are.

For me, I don’t feel like I’m their boss, it’s more like we’re three peers working together to help build this program. And they’re every day, like I always tell them I hope that I’m teaching our guys stuff and I’m teaching them stuff. They teach me something every single day and as we’re watching film, as we’re going through all these different things we’re doing as a staff, I learn from them.

I grow from them just like they’re growing from me. And I think at this level, at a small college basketball, to have a coaching staff like that. I think it’s really special and I know I’m fortunate for that.

[00:56:24] Mike Klinzing: How do you handle the delegation piece of it? Are you good at it at this point? Is it still something that you kind of struggle with because you like to have your hands in everything?

Just where are you? Giving them things that they need to do to help build the program.

[00:56:37] Shiva Senthil: Yeah, so I think one of the best things, all the coaches I worked for did, and this is every single one of them, was they were all delegators. And one of the things I was taught really early on was one of the, your jobs as a head coach is to develop your staff and it’s your responsibility to make sure whenever they get a head coaching job, they are ready.

So even when I was at SUNY Canton I had really young assistants. I had assistants who it was their first job right out of college. I made sure that I would try to delegate as much as possible, whether that was breaking down film, whether that was doing scouts, whether that was running drills in practice, whether that was grooming.

I tried to give them responsibility, and now that I’m at Oberlin with the staff I just described, it’s kind of taken to a new level where they’re so good at what they do. That for me, I can almost worry about working with them on micro-level stuff, but at the same time, like I can just focus on at the big picture stuff recruiting wise, they have their states.

I have my states, we just talk to recruits and whenever they think a recruit is close or  I should talk to them, they’ll tell me like, Hey coach, call this kid. And I’ll go call that kid and kind of reiterate our interest. In terms of practice, Nate completely runs our offense.

He essentially is our offensive coordinator and Matt completely runs our defense. He’s our defense coordinator. And in the office we talk about schematically what we want to do. Everything’s kind of in line to my beliefs of how we want to play, but at the same time, when they’re implementing stuff in practice, 90% of the time it’s Nate and Matt implementing stuff.

And then while we’re doing drills, while we’re playing, if I need to make a correction, if I need to coach guys, like that’s what I’ll do. But they’re so good and they’re so ready that at this point they’re almost like coordinators and they’re just worrying about their part of the plan, it just allows me to kind of focus on the stuff that is really, really important.

[00:58:38] Mike Klinzing: All right, so if you’re talking about big picture, let’s talk present day. You finished this season, you’re first one together as a staff, your first year at Oberlin. What are you guys sitting down and talking about in the office? Obviously there’s a ton of things, but just maybe pick out one or two things that you guys talked about as the season ended of like, okay, here’s what we did really well.

Here’s some areas where we need to improve. Just talk about kind of the end of season process for you guys.

[00:59:06] Shiva Senthil: Yeah, so absolutely, really good question. So, the first thing we did is we watched every single one of our games back. And the reason we did that is we wanted to get a really good feel of what we did well and what we didn’t do well.

And then from there, we’re trying to figure out, based on the stuff we did well and didn’t do well, how we want to play next year in terms. And for a lot of part things is going to be very similar.

I’m not a big believer in changing big picture things up from year to year, but in terms of actions, in terms of  what we’re looking for, in terms of how we want to guard different stuff, based on the guys we have returning, based on what we saw, we’re really trying to work on what we can do and what Matt’s been really diving into is kind of our defensive side of the ball and kind of seeing like, Hey, what stuff, what actions really gave us trouble? Why did it give us trouble? And Nate’s been really diving in on the offensive side of the ball, saying like, Hey, what were we really good at and why?

And then from there, like we’ve been kind of just looking at everything, having these, like these discussions as a staff saying like, Hey, how do we want to play when it comes to October 15th next year, how do we want to play offensively and how do we want to play defensively? And these discussions we’re going to continue doing throughout the summer, like our whole thing is in division three.

I think in the off season there’s two things that are really important. You have to do in the office, you have to recruit and you have to prepare for next year. And those are the things we’re really focusing on right now.

[01:00:39] Mike Klinzing: All right. So talk a little bit about the recruiting side of it. Obviously you’ve got a lot of experience back in the Northeast, in the New York area.

You’re coming to the Midwest, who maybe an area that you haven’t recruited that heavily. Oberlin obviously draws from. All over the country because of the academic institution that it is. So what’s your process from sort of beginning to end when you first begin to identify players and then sort of narrow the funnel?

[01:01:02] Shiva Senthil: Yeah, so for right now, we’re kind of in the midst of the early stages of that. We’re going through all these different recruiting lists from different states. We’re calling high school coaches, we’re calling AAU programs, and we’re trying to create our initial list. And based on the initial list we’re calling kids, introducing them to Oberlin, figuring out at the surface level if they’re a good fit for that.

And now as the spring kind of goes forward, we’re going to, at that point, start going to AAU tournaments, kind of see where the most kids are, where we can get the best bang for our buck, where we get the best yield. And we’re going to see as many recruits as possible in areas where we get a pretty good yield.

From there, we’re going to kind of narrow our list. And by the time the summer comes, we’re trying to get kids on campus for a visit for the first time. We’re going to show them campus, we’re going to talk to them about our program and give them that initial visit over the summer.

And from there, we’re going to continue narrowing our list, figuring out who’s a good fit for us, who we are a good fit for. And by the time we get to the fall, that list gets down to about 20, 25 kids that we’re talking to. And we try to get them on overnight visits. And from the kids that come on overnight visits, we try, we essentially tell them like, listen, I never put pressure on any kid to commit.

I think everyone needs to commit on their own timeline, but at the same time, we can only take certain amount in each position. It is not football, we can’t take 25 kids. So you want to have a hundred man roster. We’re bringing in five kids this year and those five kids all committed early decision, so usually we’re pretty much done recruiting in a given class by the middle of November. So that’s kind of our timeline. But right now, what we’re doing right now, just kind of beginning talking to kids and building that initial list of kids that we think that could be good fits as we continue to get to know them.

[01:03:05] Mike Klinzing: All right. So once you have a kid on campus, you talked about a little earlier in terms of building relationships, what does that look like for you day-to-day, trying to build relationships with your kids? On and off the court.

[01:03:15] Shiva Senthil:  Yeah, so I was listening to the episode you had with coach Dewitt, and one of the things he, and I think he’s an unbelievable coach.

He’s one of the best coaches that I’ve seen, and one of the things he talked about is he loves it when during the season, he hears music playing from the gym and he just goes down, he sits in the gym and he just talks with our guys. And for me, I think that’s so invaluable. I’m not a big believer in having these formal meetings.

I don’t think kids feel comfortable enough to speak their mind in these formal meetings. So what I try to do is I just try to be around them. I try to talk to them, I try to like talk about things outside of basketball. I know a lot of our guys love the nba, love college hoops.

I’ll talk to them about different things they saw the night before. And what I try to do is I just try to build that trust and I let them know that they can come and talk to me about anything in their life, I let them know right away that I’m always going to be honest with them whether they like what I’m saying or not.

But just throughout talking to them, just having conversations and building that trust and just them knowing that I’m honest, we can get deeper and deeper into building a relationship. And I think it’s pretty good now where I think our guys feel pretty comfortable talking to me. I think they have a really good relationship, but I also know this is ever building.

If you’re ever satisfied that relationship you have with the kid, then, that’s going to deteriorate, it’s a constant process and my assistants and I, we always just try to talk to our guys as much as possible, be around them, just letting them know that we’re there for them in any way possible, whether it’s on or off the court.

[01:04:57] Mike Klinzing: On the floor. When you start talking about putting together a plan for your season and breaking it down, practice by practice, just what’s your philosophy in terms of. Building a practice plan. And what do you like your practices to look and feel like?

[01:05:10] Shiva Senthil: Yeah, so for me, like I don’t want to ever spend four hours in a gym.  I want to be really, really efficient. I get at a place like Oberlin. Our guys have a ton of schoolwork. They have a bunch of things going on. Part of the reason they went to Oberlin is so they can get this incredible experience and everything. So we try to be as efficient as possible.

So that, for us means we’re always going to start off with some form of dynamic warmup. Then we’ll do some movement stuff. And that movement stuff will include skillset stuff. So whether it’s shooting, ball handling, passing, we’ll always get practice going like that.

Then I’m really big on building defense. We break down defense from the ground up. So whether it’s one-on-one, two on two, three on three, four on four, five on five, we break it down and we work on different rotations. We work on guarding the ball and we work on just competing and playing hard and through live action.

And we do that every single day. And once we build the defense, now we work on offense. And for offense, a lot of it is five on five stuff, both half court and the full court. And we put our guys in different spacing, different actions that we like to do in a game, and then we let them play out at that.

And one of the things I like to do is, Especially when we’re working on offense. I don’t love kind of micro coaching. I want guys to play things out, figure things out, and then if I see something that needs to be changed, then I’ll stop it and then I’ll coach them. But I want guys to get used to playing and competing.

And in terms of kind of just the big picture, the biggest thing we’re trying to get out of a practice more than even defense or offenses. We want to teach our guys how to compete. We want to make sure our guys come out of every practice, understanding what it’s like to play hard, because that’s the standard it takes to win a championship.

And this year, that’s all we talked about is the consistency of playing hard, the consistency of having a mindset. In every single thing we do, we try to go live and every single thing we do, we try to put a competitive aspect to it. So our guys get used to competing every single day.

[01:07:18] Mike Klinzing: When you’re competing, how do you break down the groupings in practice and who plays with who? Do you go day by day? Do you go drill by drill? Just how do you make sure that guys who are, let’s say somebody who’s the seventh or eighth man gets to play with the starters, right? You’re balancing, hey, there’s two starters on this group, two stars on that group, just how do you break it down during practice?

[01:07:40] Shiva Senthil: Yeah. So it all depends on the time of year It is. So in the beginning of the season, before games start we change our teams in practice every single day. So every day in the locker room, we’ll have a white team and a black team. The two colors of our practice uniforms, and that will come in before practice.

And those teams are absolutely broken down just based on different line of combinations. We want to see different groups that we want to evaluate as a coaching staff, and we change that around all the time until games start. And then once games start, for the most part, like our top seven or eight guys play on one team and then the rest of the guys play on the other team and they compete in everything. And then obviously if we have a couple days before a game where like say we don’t play on a Saturday and we play on a Saturday and it’s a Monday or Tuesday practice, we’ll go back to having even teams so we can get the competition up in practice again.

But then when we get back to like a Thursday practice or a Friday practice when we’re really working on the scout, working on game planning, we’ll go back to our top eight or nine on one team and then everyone else on the other team. So the top eight or nine can really get reps on what they’re going to see in that game.

[01:08:51] Mike Klinzing: That makes sense. Are there things you track during practice?

[01:08:53] Shiva Senthil: Yeah, so we film our practice and we stat your traditional stats, just like I’m sure every other coaching staff does. But on top of that one of the unique things we love to do is we track rebounding. And for us, like I told you, everything’s about the process.

So, It’s not this. We’re tracking offensive and defensive rebound. We’ve broken it down to, hey, when the shot goes up, every single person on the defensive team has a responsibility, whether it’s boxing out or going to go get the ball above the rim, depending on where you are, who you are.

And then same thing offensively. We have certain guys that we want to crash and we need them to get to certain spots on the floor and every single possession when we’re watching it on film after practice in our office, we are tracking whether they execute that or not. Our goal is every single five on five possession of practice we want to get, we track it and we want to get 80% of five on five possessions where the defense does what they need to do rebounding wise, and the offense is what they need to do rebounding wise.

The more consistent, if we can get to a place where we’re hitting 80% consistently now we can be a really good rebounding team. And this year, like my teams at Canton, we were hit 80% consistently and we were one of the best rebounding teams in the country this year. We were kind of in the seventies and we got a lot better rebounding compared to where Oberlin was in the past.

But still, I think we have room to grow and you can see it in the process, statistics, how, where, why we’re not one of the best rebounding teams in the country is because we never hit those 80% numbers on a consistent basis.

[01:10:30] Mike Klinzing: Is there something else you track? Is there a favorite metric you have during games?

Something that you found with your teams and the style of play that you have that translates to winning? Maybe there’s multiple things that you’ve kind of tracked during a game that you think, hey, these are, these are really some key metrics that help us to win games.

[01:10:44] Shiva Senthil: Yeah. So we track a couple different things. On the defensive side. We track how many times we can get three stops in a row. I think the stat is like in a given game, if you can get if you can get three stops in a row, six different times, that team wins 90% of games. So we try to track how many times we can get three stops in a row every single game.

The other thing we try to do is we offensively we want to be a team that scores through assist. Like we don’t want to be this one-on-one dribble team. We want to be a team that moves the ball around. So we try to make sure that we are seeing what, what percentage of our field goals are coming from assist.

And our goal is we want to have 60% of our field goals in a given game or more coming from assist. Whether that’s like making an assist for a layup, whether it’s drive and kick three pointers, or just making a one more pass on the perimeter. We want to get assists. So those are some things that we look for diving into like the more, the analytics side of offensive and defensive basketball that we think can really help us produce wins on the floor.

[01:11:47] Mike Klinzing: When you went into this season, your first one there at Oberlin, and you thought about what a successful year would look like, and then you get to the end of the year and you have to evaluate that. Just talk about what you feel like were some areas that you had success in this first year and kind of that you’re headed in the right direction moving forward.

[01:12:07] Shiva Senthil: Yeah, so one like in terms of kind of just like our guys, like obviously we won eight games and we have to continue to get better as a program, but the thing that makes me really excited for next year and the program as we move forward is how our guys reacted early in the season when we are really struggling. To start league play. We start off 0 and seven and I think could’ve been really easy for our guys to kind of fold and kind of just say like, Hey, this season isn’t for us, or This coach doesn’t know what he’s doing. It could have been any of that. After this 0-7 league start, we turned around and we ended up going 500 in the last stretch of the league and we ended up actually getting more wins in the previous season.

More league wins, more regular, more regular season wins as well. And the, and for me, what was the reason we were able to kind of get a, at least a little bit of a turnaround in that last stretch of the season was because our guys just stayed bought in and they. Floundered in practice. They never had a bad attitude.

By that time they were bought in like, Hey, this is a process. It’s not going to be easy. We’re going to continue working. And for me that was a critical moment when I knew we’re not going to lose our guys. When I knew like, hey, every single day we would show up to practice and guys would have a good attitude and guys were competing and guys were playing as hard as they can and they were being great teammates.

I knew that we had the right type of kids to be successful and I was just really happy for them that eventually we got to a place where now we started beating some teams and we beat Wooster for the first time in 45 years. And we had some like key moments made that made the NCAC tournament for the first time in a couple years and they ended up achieving some key goals we had in the beginning of the season, but it took longer than expected.

And they never faltered. And they never wavered in their belief. And for me that was something that made me really excited for the growth of this program.

[01:14:10] Mike Klinzing: It’s sometimes easy to sell that in the fall, right before you start playing games. It’s a lot harder to sell after you’ve lost some games to get guys to continue to buy in.

So the fact that you were able to kind of get through that rough patch and get through the dip and then come through it on the other side and, and feel like you were stronger and, and had some success like you did, I think that speaks well of what you were able to do and, and where you’re headed.

[01:14:32] Shiva Senthil: Yeah, we have guys. Honestly, I talked about resiliency and obviously you can’t in one year, make an entire program resilient. But one of the things I think I’m really fortunate for and there’s so many things that have confirmed to me like, hey, I’m in a really good spot.

I’m really enjoying Oberlin. But this is one of those things where we just got lucky where we coached this incredibly resilient bunch of kids and I don’t know if most people would expect that coming from Oberlin, coming from this lead academic institution, but we just have kids that are tough and kids are resilient.

I think that’s where obviously we talk about the mentality every single day in practice, but it’s also the credit for the guys. Like the guys are really, really tough.

[01:15:26] Mike Klinzing: I think that when you have the right guys and clearly as you start the process and you inherited some guys and now you’re in the process of recruiting and getting guys that fit what you’re looking for.

And as you get the right guys into your program and you continue to build with the guys that you have, Then that’s where you’re going to turn around and be able to have success and continue to win games and continue to build the program. As we head towards an hour and a half, I want to ask you one final two part question.

Shiva. First part is when you look ahead, so here you are sitting here today on April the sixth. What’s your biggest challenge over the next year or two, do you think? And then number two, when you think about what you get to do every day, what brings you the most joy? So your biggest challenge and then your biggest joy.

[01:16:06] Shiva Senthil: Yeah. I think the biggest challenge at Oberlin is the fact that there isn’t this history of success, especially in a league where there’s so much success around it. Like at Wittenberg and Wooster, the two winningest programs in NCAA history, Wabash has won national titles. Ohio Wesleyans won national titles.

So in a league where there’s so many successful programs, being a program that hasn’t experienced as much success, I think can be challenging. And I think it hurts us a little bit. Like we don’t get a ton of Ohio guys. And part of the reason I think is we’re just not a name brand compared to the Wittenbergs of the world that kids like, even though small college, kids have heard of Wittenberg, kids have heard of Wooster, and that’s a perception that we’re trying to fight every single day.

I think being able to recruit Ohio is going to be important for us as we move forward. So I think that’s a challenge. And I think as we get better and better and as we continue to move up the league rankings, I think that’s going to be something that is going to hopefully solve itself. And I think building a program is really important in that.

Now the biggest joy for me is, I genuinely, from the bottom of my heart hope that we kind of achieve our goals and continue growing for this program. And it’s not necessarily for me or even the coaching staff, it’s because like I said, we have such good kids here. We have kids that that really care.

They care. Before I even got here, like I told you with the things they planned, the off season stuff that they planned on their own, like we have such good kids and we have kids that want it really bad. Like they’re completely bought in on the process. And I hope that it’s going to translate to on court success because I want them to know that, hey, if you worry about things you can control, if you can worry about the process, if you approach things the right way, you’re going to be successful.

And I want them to see that. And I want them to experience that because I know these kids really want it and they’re great kids. And for me, when we can get to a point where we’re competing at the top of our league, when we get to a point where we can beat anyone in the NCAC going play in the NCAA tournament, that’s a moment that I hope we can get to and I really look forward to because I’m going to love what that means for every single thing our players have gone through and every single thing our players stand for.

[01:18:31] Mike Klinzing: That’s awesome. It’s good stuff and I think that as you start looking ahead and you think about what you can do, what you want to do, and what Oberlin has the potential to be able to do, I think it was well said.

And I think you clearly laid out the groundwork for what that’s going to look like as we go forward. Before we get out, I want to give you a chance to share how people can find out more about you, about your program. You want to share social media. Email, whatever you feel comfortable with and how people can reach out to you.

And then I’ll jump back in and wrap things up.

[01:18:57] Shiva Senthil: Yeah. So first of all, I appreciate your time. This has been awesome. I appreciate everything you’re doing for the basketball community. I’m a fan myself, and it was an honor getting on. For everyone that can, that wants to reach out to me, the easiest way is through email is ssenthi1@oberlin.edu. And or you can reach me on social media. My Twitter is coach_Senthil which is my last name. So you can reach me on Twitter, you can reach me on through email. Any way you can just if you reach out, I’ll respond.

But yeah, once again, thank you and I appreciate your time, Mike.

[01:19:38] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. Shiva, cannot I thank you enough for taking the time out of your schedule to jump on with us tonight. Truly appreciate it. And to everyone out there, thanks for listening and we will catch you on our next episode. Thanks.