How sweet it is for Marquette fans to have Shaka Smart as their men's basketball coach .
Marquette has made the NCAA Tournament in all three of his seasons at the school and reached its first Sweet 16 since 2013 after two wins last week.
Smart is two victories away from guiding the Golden Eagles to their fourth Final Four and first since 2003. It'd be Smart's second Final Four as a head coach.
Here's more about the leader of Marquette's program:
Smart was named the 18th basketball coach at Marquette University on March 26, 2021. He's in his third season with the Golden Eagles. He has also coached at Virginia Commonwealth (2009-15) and Texas (2015-21).
Smart is 347-171 since becoming the head coach at VCU in 2009. He's 75-29 at Marquette.
Yes, he grew up in Fitchburg and attended Oregon High School.
He's 46 years old.
Yes, his wife, Maya Smart , is an author, parent educator and literacy advocate. The couple have a daughter, Zora.
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Smart is 3-2 at Marquette. The Golden Eagles lost to North Carolina in the first round in 2022. They defeated Vermont and then lost to Michigan State in 2023 and they beat 15th-seeded Western Kentucky and 10th-seeded Colorado last week.
Smart is 10-10 overall in the Big Dance and 5-9 in the tournament since 2012.
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In his second season as head coach at VCU, the Rams were one of the last four teams in the NCAA Tournament, winning five straight games as an 11 seed to make the 2011 Final Four.
Smart received a contract extension in June that takes him through the 2029-2030 season. As a private university, Marquette doesn't have to make salaries public. His base salary in his last year at Texas , the 2020-21 season, was $3.4 million.
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Smart played at NCAA Division III Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where he remains the school's career assists leader, with 542.
He graduated magna cum laude from Kenyon with a degree in history, researching and writing on issues related to race and the Great Migration. Smart received an NCAA postgraduate scholarship and earned a master's degree in social science at California University of Pennsylvania.
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Smart's first coaching job was as an assistant at California University of Pennsylvania, from 1999 to 2001. Then, he was director of basketball operations at Dayton from 2001 to 2003. He was an assistant coach at Akron from 2003 to 2006, an assistant coach at Clemson from 2006 to 2008 and an assistant coach at Florida in the 2008-09 season before going to VCU.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Shaka Smart coaching career, contract, NCAA Tournament record, age
