The Wolverine: Covering University of Michigan Football and Sports
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58 THE WOLVERINE ❱ JUNE/JULY 2026 C onsidered one of the top young coaches in college basketball a few years ago, Dusty May had his choice of top-tier jobs after leading Florida Atlantic to a Fi- nal Four and the NCAA Tour- nament in back-to-back years. He was on the short list for Lou- isville, Ohio State and others when Michigan called, and the Wolverines had identified him as their top target after Juwan Howard was let go. What athletics director Warde Manuel and Co. didn't know — May and his wife, Anna, had had their eyes on Michigan, too. They'd spent a year in Wash- tenaw County when May was an Eastern Michigan assistant in 2005-06 and loved the area, the U-M brand and what a Michigan degree would mean to their sons. As for the basketball? "Michigan was a place, ultimately, with the changing landscape, that we could retain really good players, even if it wasn't going great for them," May said during his team's run to the NCAA Tournament. "It was going to be hard for players to leave. "I just felt like that's the type of place that I'd love to coach at." Two years and a national title later, he's become the hottest name in the sport. One recent media poll listed him as the best coach in the conference, ahead of Michigan State's Hall of Famer Tom Izzo and Purdue's Matt Painter. Yes, the Michigan brand opened some doors. Now more than ever, though — in this world of NIL and the transfer portal — it's about the coach, and U-M found the guy who knows how to manage it bet- ter than anybody. We wrote recently there might be no such thing as a "program" anymore given every year essentially turned into free agency. May, though, was right when he said that the Michigan brand combined with strong culture would be tough to give up. And when some less intelligent types branded him a hoarder of "mer- cenaries" for having the gall to build a winner by recruiting talent from both the portal and the prep ranks (the horror!), he said what most have come to under- stand … You adapt, or you become irrelevant. "I know this is going to set off a Twitter firestorm, but I think we all are better in certain situations than others," he said. "There's an environment that's right for me. There's an environment that's right for you. Sometimes you don't choose the right environment from the beginning, or sometimes as people we change and we need something different, for a number of reasons." One thing won't change, though … "The way we choose to look at it, we're going to bring in really, really good guys that are high achievers that want to do it the way we want to do it," he said. Whether they come from the portal or the prep ranks, overseas or under the ra- dar will vary from month to month, year to year, he added. What matters most, though, is that they're great, unselfish teammates first in addition to being good players, something any championship coach aspires to. That's exactly what this year's group was, and one of the rea- sons recruits are lining up to play for May and Michigan. The other? It's just a fun brand of basket- ball. They play fast, sacrifice for each other, and they win. As May has promised, it doesn't take a high-volume scorer, for example, to get no- ticed. There are no secrets. If you can play, you can play, and recent NBA Draft boards with Yaxel Lendeborg, Aday Mara and Morez Johnson Jr. having moved into the top 15 or 20 have proven May's hypothesis. "When the Oklahoma City Thunder won the champion- ship last year — and I'm friends with Coach [Mark] Daigneault and a lot of people in that orga- nization — I wasn't judging them because Shai Alexander was drafted by the Clippers, or because they signed Isa- iah Hartenstein as a free agent," he said. "I thought, 'Wow! Those guys played beautiful basketball. That's a great team. That's a real model for young players to watch, a group that obviously cared about each other, that played the game the right way, that represented their or- ganization, their city, their families, their last name.'" Whatever the rules are, he said, they're going to "go at it" with the objective of putting a team on the floor that repre- sents Michigan the way he thinks they deserve to be represented. And for many, yes, it's already proven to be hard to leave. The biggest reason for that, though, is the man in charge, a guy who has built a program that's become the envy of col- lege basketball. Not Duke, not North Carolina, but Michigan, thanks to the vi- sion of an elite basketball mind who is just getting started. ❏ Dusty May on his recruiting approach: "We're going to bring in really, really good guys that are high achievers that want to do it the way we want to do it." PHOTO BY LON HORWEDEL Chris Balas has been with The Wolverine since 1997. Contact him at cbalas@ thewolverine.com and follow him on X (Twitter) @Balas _ Wolverine. INSIDE MICHIGAN ❱ CHRIS BALAS New Envy Of College Basketball