King Rice-Shavar Reynolds relationship fuels Monmouth’s hot start: ‘Right then I knew I needed this guy’
Monmouth coach King Rice has told the story of his first conversation with Shavar Reynolds before. He’s eager to tell it again.
WEST LONG BRANCH – Monmouth coach King Rice has told the story of his first conversation with Shavar Reynolds before. He’s eager to tell it again.
The former Seton Hall guard entered the NCAA transfer portal earlier this year after four seasons with the Pirates. Rice remembers calling Reynolds on FaceTime – not the other way around, he points out, as it often goes when a player seeks a new program.
“His first thing to me was, ‘Coach, I want to lead the country in assists,’” Rice said Wednesday. “I said, ‘OK, what else?’ Because I’m waiting for him to tell me he needs the ball in his hands, he needs this many shots, because that’s what every super-senior does, especially coming down (a level) a little bit.
“Then he goes, ‘And then Coach, I just need someone to really believe me as a coach.’ And now I start thinking somebody put him up to this. Because that’s who I am – I’m gonna make you believe in yourself on the basketball court and when you show me you can do it, I’m gonna let you rock and you’re gonna know I’m behind you and I got your back. And then he asked me about (Monmouth guards) Sam Chaput and Myles Ruth. He was like, ‘How are they gonna feel with me coming in as an older dude?’”
Rice leaned forward.
“And right then I knew I needed this guy on my team. I needed him on my team, because of those qualities, and he’s been 10 times better than all the things he said.”
He’s not leading the nation in assists, but Reynolds’ qualities have been on display throughout the first month of Monmouth’s season. Last Saturday, he went 9-for-9 at the free throw line against Saint Joseph’s and finished with a career-high 25 points in a road win. Then came Wednesday, when he helped Monmouth restrict Princeton to 18 second-half points and knocked down three straight 3-point tries in a 76-64 victory.
Reynolds had a bout with the flu between those games, and on Wednesday Rice decided to keep him out of the starting five. He still made his presence felt with 16 points, five rebounds, a steal and a block over 27 minutes.
Was there really a question about how Chaput and Ruth and leading scorer George Papas would react to a new vet joining the backcourt? Rice appreciated Reynolds’ concern, but five games into the season, it’s not looking like an issue.
Sitting between Papas and Reynolds, Rice started to kid the Hawks’ fifth-year alpha dog.
“George is a tough one,” he said. “New guy coming in – you know, George is from Jersey. Y’all don’t welcome that easy around here. You’ve got to prove it to people.”
What Rice forgot is that Reynolds also calls the Garden State home. New Jerseyans (count me among them) can be protective of the state, for sure. But it’s a different conversation when dealing with one of your own.
Papas, who led Monmouth Wednesday with 20 points, seems glad to get along with the new guy. He helped Reynolds get open to sink three straight 3-pointers in a 2:35 span, making the score 55-55, 60-57 and 63-57 to swing the game the Hawks’ way for the rest of the night.
“I’m usually the one screening for George. He’s like ‘Nah, nah, you come off,’” Reynolds said. “I was like, ‘oh, OK!’ ... That’s another (testament) to Coach Rice. You don’t have to worry with him. You don’t have to second-guess your shots. You can just play. Long as you’re giving that same effort defensively, he’ll let you play your game.
“That was really just my teammates playing hard and finding me, and then Coach Rice allowing me to be myself.”
Rice is, by all accounts, a player’s coach. With a roster as experienced as he has this season, he knows he doesn’t need to yell or micromanage or be too hands-on in the locker room. The upperclassmen, Reynolds included, are handling that. It’s how Rice likes it, because “they’re grown-ups,” he said, and “I’d be a fool not to lean on them.”
Here’s what that spells for Monmouth: a 4-1 record with four straight wins following a two-point opening-night loss to Charlotte. They notched a stellar victory in their renewed rivalry with Princeton – a team that has beaten South Carolina and Oregon State and gone toe-to-toe with Minnesota for 50 minutes.
Of the eight New Jersey programs that play Division I hoops, Monmouth’s 4-1 mark is tied for the best record in the state with none other than Seton Hall, Reynolds’ longtime stomping grounds.
Reynolds’ origin story is the kind that shows college sports at their best. He didn’t get many looks coming out of Manchester High School, but after a year at Covenant College Prep – a basketball academy near Belmar – he walked on at Seton Hall. Reynolds told coach Kevin Willard he couldn’t afford to pay tuition for his second year on campus, and Willard decided to upgrade him to a scholarship player.
The rest of that storybook is filled with fantastic buzzer-beaters and moments where he teamed up with program greats like Myles Powell and Sandro Mamukelashvili. But Reynolds decided the book needed a change of setting for its final chapter, and with the fifth year of eligibility provided by the NCAA due to the pandemic, he found another New Jersey home.
“It’s been lovely,” Reynolds said. “It’s been a totally different experience in terms of, it’s more personal. Because I get to play. I don’t want to get too in-depth, but I just get to play basketball again. You get to enjoy it, have fun again. I just love the group. Everyone wants to get better. There’s no egos, no selfishness. I just enjoy it again. There’s no pressure. I don’t have to look over my shoulder. I just get to have fun again. That’s all I really wanted.
“Because I think sometimes in all this, you can really lose that, because you’re trying to pursue a dream for so long that you lose the: ‘go out there and just play.’ Enjoy the game because you’ve been doing this your whole life.”
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For everyone at home still stuffed with turkey, thanks for reading. I think I can relate to what Reynolds said at the tail end of his answer to my question: When you chase your dreams for so long, your greatest passions really can get clouded with undesirable side effects. That’s why on this Thanksgiving weekend, I continue to be grateful that I get to do what I love for a living, and that I’ve begun to mold this newsletter into a new outlet that’s helping me now and hopefully takes me into the future.
Now let’s clean the glass with other notes and observations from around New Jersey:
Per KenPom.com, Monmouth ranks inside the top 40 in the country in adjusted tempo; Princeton ranks outside the top 300. That essentially means Princeton games feature fewer possessions per 40 minutes and Monmouth tends to play much faster. The Tigers led Wednesday’s game 46-39 at halftime because they got to play it their way, according to Reynolds. The Hawks responded in the second half by contesting more shots, trapping Jaelin Llewellyn and flustering them into making snap decisions that didn’t always go too well.
“In the first half, they were walking it down, getting into their sets,” Reynolds said. “We were letting them back-cut us, we were letting them catch the ball through the high post. In the second half you see that we started reading the screens more. They didn’t like that, because before we were switching, we were giving them more lanes and we were spreading out – then we would just leave (center) Walker (Miller) on an island.”
Seton Hall made its fans pretty nervous Wednesday night as it battled with Cal, widely considered to be Not a Very Good Team. Hall won 62-59 as the Golden Bears outshot the Pirates 44.9 percent to 34 percent and won on the boards 36-30, both very surprising outcomes. Seton Hall will try to shake that one off Sunday when they meet an overmatched Bethune-Cookman of the SWAC.
The Pirates announced three recruits who signed national letters of intent this week during the early signing period. Shooting guard Jaquan Sanders, combo guard JaQuan Harris and center Percy Daniels are all 3-stars per the 247Sports Composite. Of note, Harris is Jamir Harris’ younger brother. The class currently ranks 41st in the country and fifth in the Big East, a tier below Villanova, Xavier and UConn, all of whom have multiple 4-star commits.