SOUTH BEND — Put him on the free throw line with Notre Dame basketball down one and precious seconds remaining in an Atlantic Coast Conference game.
Put the ball in his hands in an end-of-game situation and ask him to go make the right read.
Put him on the other team’s top scorer with the Irish needing a defensive stop to get out of a league road game in one of those can-you-believe-that-happened wins.
Put him in any of the above high-stress/high-leverage scenarios, and each will feel like a breeze for Devin Brown compared to his brief stay in the college basketball transfer portal this spring.
Having played one season at Davidson, where he earned Atlantic-10 all-rookie honors after averaging 6.4 points, 3.4 rebounds, 1.6 assists in 23.4 minutes with 27 starts, the 6-foot-6, 200-pound Brown had no idea what his first and, hopefully last, foray into the offseason transfer portal among more than 2,640 players would be like.
He didn’t expect it to be like that. Brown has played in plenty of high-pressure basketball games. He’s delivered in high-pressure basketball games, like when he helped Olentangy (Ohio) Orange High School win a Division 1 (big school) state championship his senior season.
What do they say, it’s nice to be wanted? Not in this portal case. Nothing Brown has done on the basketball court compares to everything he felt in the basketball transfer portal.
“I hated it,” the 19-year-old admitted. “It was very stressful. You just had to see through all the BS sifting through it all.”
Coaches from other basketball programs would call Brown and tell him how much they liked him and that they wanted to recruit him, then never called again. Other colleges would reach out and say that they weren’t that interested, only to soon be interested. It was up one day, down the next. Round and ‘round it went until Brown believed he found a program where he fit.
On Sunday, April 26, Brown committed to Notre Dame over Charleston and Temple. He considered his hometown school, Ohio State, but no program offered what Notre Dame did in terms of fit and feel.
For Brown, who has three seasons of eligibility remaining, that mattered.
“Find a coach who is honest and you can trust and has a plan in place,” Brown said. “Having a plan is important. (Notre Dame) had a plan in place. They knew me as a player. They knew my strengths and they know what I did well, what I didn’t do well and what I can showcase more on the college level.
“With Notre Dame, I made the perfect choice.”
It was weird for Brown to realize that Irish head coach Micah Shrewsberry and his staff knew so much about his game. Like, really knew it. They had scouted film of Brown’s freshman year. They knew he could do this and this and this. They knew he needed to work on that. They liked his versatility. They liked him.
No other school knew Brown’s game as well as the one that was 655 miles away from his previous college basketball home.
“I’m not sure how they knew about me,” Brown said. “It all happened pretty fast, but they knew what they were talking about when they called me.”
Notre Dame knew of Brown and learned more about him in a six-degrees-of-separation sort of way. A cousin of Olentangy Orange High School boys’ basketball coach Anthony Calo knows someone on the Notre Dame staff and reached out. Calo’s father, Ed, an Ohio High School boys’ basketball legend, let it slip one night over dinner with his son that he even called Shrewsberry about Brown.
Twenty-five years ago, Anthony Calo worked a summer basketball camp at Butler, where his hoops path crossed with a then-DePauw assistant — Shrewsberry. The two lost touch until one recent day this spring when an email from Shrewsberry dropped into Calo’s school account.
Not long afterward, Brown was on a Zoom with Shrewsberry. Then on a visit to Notre Dame and, eventually, a commitment as the fifth transfer portal addition this spring.
“Love it,” Calo said. “No doubt in my mind that Devin can play at the ACC level.”
Someone who knew someone who knew someone helped bring Brown to Notre Dame. It was also someone who was supposed to play for Notre Dame, but never did, who also assisted.
One-time Irish recruit Parker Friedrichsen, who had signed to play at Notre Dame out of high school but never did after the resignation of former coach Mike Brey, just finished his first season at Davidson after one at Wake Forest.
As Brown considered Notre Dame, he talked with Friedrichsen, one of two Davidson players (along with Brown) to play in all 34 games last season, who helped fill in some blanks. One of Friedrichsen’s first comments? Wait until you see Rolfs Hall. It’s one of one.
Brown fell hard for the stand-alone basketball facility over the weekend.
“He wasn’t wrong,” Brown said. “There are a lot of resources in there that you don’t find at a lot of mid-majors. It’s just a place that you want to be in.”
Asked to describe his game, Brown doesn’t talk of controlling everything as a point guard or scoring it like a two-guard. At Davidson, he guarded every position one through four. He probably could’ve guarded the five spot if given a chance.
He’s not specifically a guard or a forward. He’s a basketball player. He can fit in a variety of different roles, including one that the Irish have lacked the last three seasons.
“He just wants to win,” Calo said of someone who went 76-8 in high school. “He’s extremely versatile. He’ll find a way to be on the floor. He will pleasantly surprise people at Notre Dame.”
Follow South Bend Tribune and NDInsider columnist Tom Noie on X (formerly Twitter): @tnoieNDI. Contact Noie at tnoie@sbtinfo.com
This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: How one transfer portal guard wound up with Notre Dame basketball
Reporting by Tom Noie, South Bend Tribune / South Bend Tribune
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
