Šarūnas "Šaras" Jasikevičius ([ʃɐˈrûːnɐs jɛsʲɪˈkʲæːvʲɪtɕʊs] ; born 5 March 1976) is a Lithuanian professional basketball coach and former player who is the head coach for Fenerbahçe of the Turkish Basketbol Süper Ligi and the EuroLeague. During his playing career, standing at a height of 6 ft 4 in (1.93 m) tall, he played at the point guard position.
Often considered one of the best Lithuanian and European point guards ever, Jasikevičius was a two-time All-EuroLeague First Team selection, the EuroLeague Final Four MVP in 2005 and a four-time triple crown winner. He was named the 2005 Israeli Basketball Premier League MVP. Moreover, he was the first player in EuroLeague history to win the competition with three clubs. A former representative of the senior Lithuanian men's national team, he won the gold medal at 2003 EuroBasket, earning an All-EuroBasket Team selection and MVP honors in the process. He also won the bronze medal at the 2000 Summer Olympic Games, and the bronze medal at 2007 EuroBasket.
In 2015, Jasikevičius was named a EuroLeague Basketball Legend as a reward for his playing career and was honored with a ceremony.
He has won both Liga ACB and Spanish Cup with Barcelona as both a coach and player, as well as both Turkish Basketball League and Turkish Cup with Fenerbahçe in same capacities. He also won the Euroleague title as Fenerbahçe coach in 2025. Additionally, he achieved victory in the Lithuanian League with Zalgiris, also as both coach and player.
Jasikevičius was born into a family of athletes. His mother Rita, a famous Lithuanian handball player, won a silver medal with the Soviet Union women's national handball team during the 1975 World Women's Handball Championship. Following the success in the world championship, Rita was preparing for the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. According to Rita: "Everything was calculated, planned: Olympic Games, then - the increase of family, one year break and then back to sports again. But everything happened differently" and she had to choose between her son and the Olympic Games. She decided to give birth to a child and give up the Olympic dream. Later on, the Soviet squad went on to win the Olympic gold medals in the Montreal Olympics and the national team's head coach shut the door for Rita Jasikevičienė to return into the national team in the future. However, Šarūnas's mother never regretted her decision. Šarūnas remembers that his mother constantly said: "My son will give me back the Olympics".
In his childhood Šarūnas was a very agile child. His mother remembers that soon after learning to walk, Šarūnas immediately began to run leaning at 45 degrees. Rita: "He was running and running everywhere and I had to constantly chase him". The biggest penalty for Šarūnas was to sit. His younger brother Vytenis was slightly different though. He was slower, but both brothers were unable to live without a ball as kids.
Jasikevičius's father Linas always was a sports lover and his son followed his lead to cheer for practically anything. Together they cheered for the USSR national teams or any athlete who had USSR written across his or her chest. Not surprisingly, his dad took him to his first basketball workout when he was 6 years old. His first coach was Feliksas Mitkevičius in Kaunas basketball school, who was strict and never chased Šarūnas when he tried to run away from workouts and also coached Žydrūnas Ilgauskas and Tomas Masiulis. According to Mitkevičius, when Šarūnas was 12 years old, he was so sick of basketball that he wished to drop it. He visited his parents, outlined the situation and stated that it would be a huge loss to Lithuania. Following it, his dad had some strong words for Šarūnas and forbade him to drop basketball, which he wished to replace with tennis. In Kaunas basketball school he met with future NBA star Žydrūnas Ilgauskas with whom he was meeting practically every day, at school, in the gym or elsewhere for the next eleven years. Tomas Masiulis was another notable player on his team. Jasikevičius remembers that at first he was seen as the guy who was "talented but lazy" as he was not a committed athlete; all he did was joke around and try to work as little as possible. Consequently, on one occasions, his dad stopped him from going on a trip to Minsk with the team, a trip of the sort that only happens once a year, as his marks were disastrous and it was a punishment: "No school? So no basketball". However, his parents were happy to see him pouring his hyperactivity into basketball, and this made them urge him on towards the sport, as it also helped him avoid bad company. They played in the gym, and also in the street using scrap metal instead of real baskets, and their favorite pastime was called minus, a kind of forerunner of the game that can be seen today during the NBA All-Star Game called "horse". It was far from ideal, but his parents preferred to see him play with the scrap metal hoops in front of their home than down at the pitch, where it would have taken him less than five minutes to pick a fight with the wrong person. His childhood dream was to become a Žalgiris player, a team of which he was such a fan that he knew everything about every player, even the players' shoe sizes. Following the Žalgiris' victory in 1986 Intercontinental Cup, he begged his father to take him to the airport to welcome home the players, where hundreds of people were waiting in the freezing cold. His father knew some of the players, and managed to get signed posters and photos that he used to decorate all the walls of his room.
Šarūnas started going to school at Jonas Jablonskis Middle School in 1982 and attended it until 1987. He had to take the bus to go to school even though the thermometer outside read minus twenty and he knew that the most important thing for his parents was that he spent as little time as possible with the bad kids on Partizanai Street. From 1987 to 1993, he studied at Kaunas 4th Middle School. On his first class trip, he went to Moscow, which he visited before the tournament. Jasikevičius's greatest youth memory in the city was the opening of the first McDonald's in Russia. He remembers that his classmates were listening with their mouths gaped open when he was telling them about the French fries, bread rolls with minced beef and fizzy drinks. One of his childhood passions was history, especially about the Native Americans, as well as books about basketball as he was capable of reading a book of more than four hundred pages on basketball in two days. He was also curious about politics, especially when Perestroika began, because of which he was able to travel to Berlin with his father and brother, and was amazed by the visit to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum. His childhood favorite Lithuanian player was Arvydas Sabonis, whom he admired more than any other Lithuanian superstars, like Rimas Kurtinaitis and Valdemaras Chomičius, because of Sabonis' elite passing. However, his idol was Dražen Petrović, and he wished to be as good as him, watching his matches again and again, dozens of times, for hours and hours, and later started imitating him in workouts. After one of his trips, his dad came back with a videocassette recorder, using which he was able to record an NBA All-Star Game with Michael Jordan, Clyde Drexler, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and David Robinson, and was later to watch it for a couple of years, more than a hundred times. Jasikevičius also started to record games of Žalgiris and Petrović every time he was able to. Thanks to the video recorder, he discovered the existence of the no-look pass of Magic Johnson. For him, he was the NBA, not Michael Jordan. His unselfishness, imagination, the way he dribbled, and how he passed between his opponent's legs bewitched Jasikevičius. Consequently, his favorite element of basketball quickly became assisting his teammates, which he tried to do like Petrović or Johnson.
Later he continued his studies in the United States. In 1993–94 he attended Solanco High School in Quarryville, Pennsylvania. That year his team won 25 of 27 games and was one of the contenders for the State Championship final, however they lost their first playoff game and finished the season early. However, he was noticed by Billy Hahn, who was working as University of Maryland assistant coach and who invited Jasikevičius to join them.