A curious mind and a bit of meditation have helped Sam Brown start strong at Penn

Sam Brown has gotten a lot of things from his father. He has traveled the world and fallen in love with basketball, with access to perfect his smooth, left-handed jump shot in facilities unlike many of his peers.

What Brett Brown isn’t, however, is a meditator. Sam has discovered meditation, he said, over the last six months or so. He has read books and listened to podcasts and has picked and chosen the methods that work best for him. Sometimes that means just sitting alone, in silence, being present in the moment.

There are a lot of new things in Sam Brown’s new world. Penn like most Ivy League grounds, is home to a web of curiosities waiting to be explored. And during the first half of Brown’s freshman year, he’s exploring them. With an undecided major in Penn’s prestigious Wharton School, he has taken classes that introduced him to artificial intelligence in writing, to elements of finance, to anthropology and human evolution.

Oh, there’s basketball exploration, too. Brown, who starred at Lower Merion while his father led the 76ers until his firing in 2020, is picking up right where he left off. He exited Lower Merion as the program’s all-time leader with 245 three-pointers. Through 12 games — he missed four of Penn’s games with an ankle injury — Brown is connecting on 47.2% of his three-point attempts (34-for-72), good for eighth in Division I men’s basketball. No other freshman is inside the top 60 in three-point percentage.

If you’re wondering how he hasn’t missed a beat, even as the rigors of Ivy League classes are added to the mix, it’s as much about the newfound love of meditation as it is the 60,000 shots he took in the driveway with Brett — yes, they counted them — during the COVID-19 summer off, and the countless jump shots with the shooting machine over the years. The physical skills have always been present. The mental skills set Sam apart.

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What has changed, Brown said, is he has learned to not be so results-oriented when it comes to shooting. He knows how hard he has worked, and relies on that knowledge to relieve the pressure of making shots.

“You go in waves of confidence and that’s normal, but being able to cut away emotions from the process has been a big part of it,” he said.

“You put pressures on yourself that you don’t even realize until you actualize them in your head. The ability to not try so hard to be perfect, be willing to make mistakes and be within the game.”

Brown hasn’t been perfect, but it’s hard to imagine a freshman season starting out much better. He is scoring 11.6 points and pulling in 3.7 rebounds to go with 1.8 assists in 30.8 minutes per game. He already hit the 20-point mark in a Jan. 2 loss at Auburn. In all but three of his 12 games, he has hit multiple three-pointers.

Penn coach Steve Donahue knew the shooter he was getting when he recruited Sam from Lower Merion. What has been surprising, Donahue said, is some of the little things, like the way he navigates screens. Brown has this technique, Donahue said, in which he “gets low and gets his body skinny and gets out to the shooter.” He’s more athletic, better at rebounding at this level, tougher, and better at ballhandling than Donahue thought he’d be at this point.

The product of being a coach’s son?

“He was raised in a gym,” Brett Brown said. “For the most part he was raised in the NBA. We’re so privileged to have the resources that we have, and the scheming and the game planning and all that type of stuff. Inevitably, you share different tricks along the way and help technique. His competitiveness I have been proud of. You combine that with fundamentals and technique and nuances of how to guard really good players, I hope it’s just added up. I think sometimes when I’m watching him play, you feel like it has.”

Brown’s development is even more critical right now for Penn, which is without senior point guard, and leading scorer Clark Slajchert for the foreseeable future because of an ankle injury. Penn will go as its top freshmen — Sam and Tyler Perkins (14.8 points, 5.8 rebounds) — go.

“Sam is just a very cerebral player and I think he understands now his role has to be even greater as far as organizing us and running the team, keeping the pace, getting us into sets,” Donahue said.

The mediation and mental skills Brown has been working on can be applied here, too. It would be easy, he said, to put more pressure on himself. But the whole point of the work he has put in on the mental side of his game is to eliminate all of the emotion.

“Maybe your role changed, but that doesn’t change the way you feel when you play,” Brown said.

As Donahue said, “we play a style of basketball that’s not predicated on one guy.” For example, Penn beat Dartmouth by 29 points Saturday in its Ivy League opener. Brown scored just five points on 2-for-8 shooting. A bad day? Not quite, Donahue said.

“He played with force on offense,” the coach said. “He snapped the passes. He sprinted through on cuts. He guarded ball screens. He just did every read right. He was really good. Maybe if he made two more shots, everyone thinks he was great. But he was exactly what I hoped.”

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This is where the lineage, and this specific lineage with this coach and this athlete, likely play a role.

Brown has been watching Ivy League basketball since seventh grade, he said. Ever since his freshman year at Lower Merion, when it became clear that playing at a place like Penn, where he could mix his love of basketball with his intellectual desires, was a likely result, Brett and Sam dialed in on perfecting the type of game that would succeed in the Ivy League.

“Being a son of a coach, you have realistic views for where you can land, and we knew this level of basketball was a very real possibility for me,” Sam said. “Our focuses shifted toward that. We’re going to prepare ourselves for that type of level if we think I’m going to end up there.”

Brett Brown is back in San Antonio coaching with Gregg Popovich and the Spurs, but he’s still watching. He got to see Sam play in person when the Quakers visited Houston just before New Year’s. The whole family went down and spent some time with Brett in San Antonio. The Spurs will be in Philadelphia later this month, too.

Brett spends some plane rides between NBA cities watching Penn basketball and analyzing Sam’s game.

“I’m always trying to split the difference of being a dad and doing my job here,” Brett said. “I hope I strike the correct balance.”

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“He’s as much of a basketball guru and lover as you’ll ever find,” Sam said. “I’ll always look at him as an outlet for advice. He knows me better than anyone. He’s seen me at my worst and he’s seen me at my best. He can tell me within the first five seconds of a game he’ll know how I’ll play. It’s a feel thing, my body language.”

It’s a dad thing just as much as a coach thing. Brett said he’s happy with Sam’s start, but knows there’s more work to do.

“I think he’s headed in the right direction,” Brett said. “I am thrilled that he chose the school that he chose. I’ve been a big fan of Steve for a long time and the education at Wharton, all that stuff. I think he’s in the right spot, heading in the right direction.”

For most of Sam’s formative years, he has been Brett Brown’s son. The family came to the Philadelphia region when Sam was just 8 years old, and Brett coached the Sixers until the 2020 NBA bubble wrapped up. For the record, Sam loved all of that. He got to shoot around with Joel Embiid and travel the world. It afforded him a great childhood, a great dad, and so much more.

But his identity? He has thought about that, too. He’ll always be Brett Brown’s son. But here, now, on this Ivy League campus and in the sphere of Division I basketball, Brown is just another student, another basketball player, learning more about himself as the days pass.

“I think you do a lot of growing,” he said. “With that growth comes a self-identification. You’re able to think about who am I? I’m able to drop that side of my identity and become more of myself, think about who I am as a person, what I value, what I want to get better at.

“In the past, I could’ve put pressure on myself to present myself in a certain light, but in recent months, recent years, I believe I’ve been able to drop that and be more of myself.”