Albany, NY--Head Men's Basketball Coach Brian Barnes announced the addition of Barryn Shark (New York, NY/Mount Saint Joseph Academy) as the newest member of the Gator coaching staff. Shark is no stranger to Sage having spent the last two years as the graduate assistant for RSC's Athletic Communications office. Shark, a 2020 graduate of Clarkson University, earned his MBA from Russell Sage College's Graduate School in May of 2022.
"Barryn is a great addition to our coaching staff," noted Barnes. He added, "His experience as a graduate assistant in our athletic communications office has given him a unique vantage point of our program the last two years. He is a hard worker, a great person and is someone, who is eager to make a name for himself as a college assistant coach. I'm confident he is a great fit for our program and core values!"
Having spent the last two years with the athletic communications office, Shark has a valuable insight into the Gators and Coach Barnes' coaching philosophy having covered the team and worked on social media projects as well as videos and videos streaming of home athletic contests.
A four-year letterwinner at Clarkson on the men's basketball team, Shark excelled in the classroom and on the hardwood for the Golden Knights' basketball team. Handing out over 200 career assists, he ranks among the program's career assist leaderboard, while also having earned numerous Dean's List citations. He was the president of the Clarkson Chess Club and the recipient of a Leadership Award, while earning his bachelor of science degree in Business Intelligence and Data Analytics as well as a minor in Quality Based Project Management.
Shark worked for three years in game day operations at Clarkson, garnering experience in volleyball and soccer. He also assisted with the video live streaming for the men's and women's lacrosse programs at Clarkson. In addition, he brings additional skills and experience having completed several academic projects including a Data Analytics Project, where he planned and built a data driven application in Python. Shark also created a narrative, ERD diagrams and wrote basic HTML that was centered around the creation of an online sneaker store. In the fall of his senior year, he was also involved with a Big Data Architecture project that web scraped and parsed information from espn.com's NBA box scores using Python coding skills. The open-ended project was graded based on usability, unit testing, complexity, and documentation/questions and Shark earned a 100% for his efforts and work.
Shark joins a program that earned Empire 8 Tournament appearances the last three seasons, while also earning acclaim as the recipient of the 2021-2022 Sam Schoenfield Sportsmanship Award by the Collegiate Basketball Officials Association this past season.