Marquette's Shaka Smart is named national basketball coach of the year by the Associated Press

The Marquette men's basketball team is going to need more shelf space at the Al McGuire Center for all the hardware that the Golden Eagles won this season.

There are the Big East regular-season and tournament trophies, of course, but the individual accolades are piling up as well.

MU's Shaka Smart earned his latest honor on Friday when he was named national coach of the year by the Associated Press.

The 45-year-old Smart garnered 24 of 58 votes from media panel to beat out Kansas State's Jerome Tang and Houston's Kelvin Sampson. Smart is the second MU coach to win the award after Al McGuire in 1971.

Smart also won the national coach of the year awards handed out by the United States Basketball Writers Association and the National Association of Basketball Coaches. He was also named the Big East coach of the year by both the media and the league's coaches.

The narrative of the Golden Eagles' season has been retold with every award. MU was picked by Big East coaches to finish ninth in the 11-team league, but the Golden Eagles tied a conference record with 17 victories.

That 17-3 record earned MU its first outright Big East title, and then the Golden Eagles followed that up by winning three games in three days at Madison Square Garden for their first tournament championship in the league.

Along the way, MU earned its highest ranking in the Associated Press top 25 since the 1970s. The Golden Eagles were a No. 2 seeding in the NCAA Tournament and won a game in March Madness for the first time since 2013.

But MU's season ended in the Round of 32 with a loss to seventh-seeded Michigan State. Still it was a remarkable season in Smart's second year at MU.

"I'm very grateful to win this award," Smart told the AP, "but obviously it always comes back to the guys you have on your team.

"Early on we had a real sense the guys had genuine care and concern for one another, and we had a very good foundation for relationships that we could continue to build on. And over the course of seasons, you go through so many different experiences as a team. And those experiences either bring you closer together or further apart. Our guys did a great job, even through adverse experiences, even through challenges, becoming closer together."

Smart has emphasized player development since he took over at MU, and the improvement of returning players helped spearhead the season. Tyler Kolek was an All-American and the Big East player of the year, while Oso Ighodaro, Kam Jones and David Joplin also won individual league accolades.

The Golden Eagles' success seems sustainable, with every rotation player from the season eligible to return.

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Marquette's Shaka Smart is Associated Press national coach of year