The Michigan Wolverines corralled the sports media into Crisler Center on a Sunday in July to let reporters get a look at — and footage of — the returning men’s basketball players and latest recruits in action. Reporters got 20 minutes to quiz second-year head coach Dusty May, an hour to watch athletes run drills, and finally a half hour to sidle up to the student-athletes for more grist for their content-thirsty sports sections.
The other journalists ate it all up. To my mind, though, the most intriguing part of the morning was watching May, all of 5-foot-10, run rings around his gang of sequoia-size charges while teaching them new plays. Overdressed in gray sweats, a long-sleeve Michigan blue polyspandex blend shirt, and leopard-print white Jordans, the boyish 48-year-old repeatedly laid down his clipboard to show the kids how it’s done.
“I’ve never seen nothing like it,” says forward Yaxel Lendeborg, who, weeks earlier, was persuaded by May to withdraw from the NBA draft and instead play for him in Ann Arbor this year. “It’s real interesting just being able to play with my coach. He lives every day with us.”
Guard Trey McKinney, a top freshman recruit from Illinois, is equally in awe: “It’s crazy because he works out in the weight room with us, does everything with us. It’s definitely good to have an active coach who can get on the floor with you and compete with you.”
That personal touch may go a long way toward explaining why May’s star has risen so far so fast in the college basketball world: People just like him, and like playing for and with him. As he heads into his second season overseeing one of the nation’s premier programs under a contract worth more than $5 million a year, it’s all the more astonishing that just four years ago, he was a relatively anonymous head coach at a small, relatively anonymous school, Florida Atlantic University.
“If you knew Dusty, you wouldn’t ever underestimate him,” says Jamie Hudson, head boys’ basketball coach at Eastern Greene High School in rural southern Indiana, where he and May played and graduated together. “You look at what he did at FAU. Every year, they got better and better. I knew what he could do. It was just a matter of time of him proving it.”
What he did at FAU was take a no-name Boca Raton commuter school that was decades removed from its only NCAA Tournament appearance and coach them to the 2023 Final Four. They came a buzzer-beater from advancing to the finals — and May suddenly became the hottest coaching prospect in the nation.
University of Michigan Athletic Director Warde Manuel took note but wasn’t expecting a coaching vacancy any time soon. His squad was led by Juwan Howard, who as a player in 1993 helped U-M basketball to a national championship appearance that was later vacated. While 2023 was the first time U-M failed to make March Madness since 2015, Howard’s previous success earned him grace for a down season.
The next year, when the Wolverines cratered to last place in the Big Ten, Manuel pursued May. “I just wanted the opportunity to talk to him,” he says. When they did meet, Manuel discovered an uncanny connection — his wife was the realtor who had sold May his first house in Ypsilanti in 2005 when May took his first assistant coaching job at Eastern Michigan University. Manuel was associate AD at U-M at the time. “I had no idea, but Dusty brought it up in the first conversation we had.”
THE SON of divorced parents — his dad was a coal miner; his mom a secretary — he gravitated to basketball in the first grade, which is also when he met Anna, the girl who became his wife. They didn’t start dating until they were 15, by which time he was captain of the varsity basketball team and she was a cheerleader. They’d go their own ways for college — he to Oakland City University, a Division II school in southwest Indiana, to play ball; she to Purdue University to prepare for her career as an occupational therapist — and married in 2000.
May dreamed of playing pro ball but realized when he stalled out at 5-foot-10 that it was unlikely. “There’s a certain point where you get dunked on by a guy that jumps five times as high as you, who is much taller than you and much more physically gifted, that you just run out of talent,” he says.
Instead, he figured he’d become a high school teacher and coach because, he says, “I realized the impact that my coaches had on me, and I wanted to do what they did.”
He hated Oakland City University and decided to transfer sophomore year to Indiana University, where he landed a job as a student manager for famed fiery coach Bobby Knight’s Hoosiers. His “in” was another one of those wild coincidences; as a teen, he’d mowed the yard of a man who’d served in the Navy with IU’s team doctor. The team doctor eventually set May up with the gig, which led to a pivotal conversation.
“I was a sophomore in college, and one of the assistant coaches for coach Knight asked me what I was going to do, and I said I wanted to coach,” May recalls. “And he said, ‘High school or college?’ I didn’t realize college was even an option.”
Was it ever. Working under Knight opened doors for May through which he steadily built a career. From 2005 to 2018, he was an assistant coach at five schools in five states before, in 2018, taking the top job at FAU.
Along the way, he kept his focus on finding athletes who wanted to learn, who wanted to be mentored, who wanted to be part of something bigger. “As a teacher or coach, that’s what we’re trying to do,” May says. “We’re trying to unify groups and get them to perform better than they could otherwise.”
If that were all there was to it, of course, everyone would do it. And, indeed, May has made it look easy. The turnaround for Michigan in just his first year — from last place in the conference in 2023-24 to making it to the Sweet Sixteen in 2024-25 — was so dramatic and fast that even Manuel admits to being stunned.
“What surprised me was how quickly he was able to pull the team together and get a cohesive group, because when he took over, we had three kids on the roster,” Manuel says. “All the other ones had either finished and were going into the pros, or finished and going on to other careers, or transferred out, or declared that they were going to transfer.
People would have thought I was crazy if I said, ‘Look, I’m going to hire a new coach, and then … we’re going to be ranked No. 1 in the Big Ten for weeks, we’re going to compete for the regular-season title, we’re going to win the Big Ten tournament the next year. People would’ve run me out of here. We won eight games the year before. This just doesn’t happen.”
MAY’S ENTHUSIASM for the sport hasn’t just inspired his student-athletes; basketball is now a family business. His oldest son, Jack, played for the University of Florida from 2020 to 2024 and now works for the Miami Heat; his middle son, Charlie, plays for him at Michigan, and the youngest, Eli, is a team manager. (Charlie is a walk-on and has no expectation of getting much playing time; he’s there, he says, to help his father.)
“Most of our lives revolve around basketball,” Charlie says. “Holidays like Thanksgiving, we’re traveling to where games are. Christmas, we have maybe three days off.”
Their father is always working, too; when Eli, Dusty, and Anna were watching Hulu’s The Bear one night this summer, Dusty also “had his laptop open watching practice from a couple days ago, and then he was watching a game last year against Minnesota,” Eli says. “He’s always on the phone or watching film. We’ll talk about the practice, who played well today, what he’s working on, recruits — whatever.”
The May family has been transformed since that 2023 Final Four run and Dusty’ssubsequent elevation to U-M. “Will Ferrell was at the Michigan practice facility one day,” Eli marvels. “I sat next to Luke Walton, who was the Lakers’ coach, at a Michigan football game. I went to Vegas with my dad to watch Summer League a couple weeks ago.”
May says he’s settling in for a long run at Michigan after a vagabond life climbing the coaching ladder. Rumors spread earlier this year that he might pursue the head coach’s post at Indiana, his alma mater and the team of his lifelong fan allegiance. Around the same time, Manuel and May hammered out a one-year contract extension to his original five-year deal with a $1 million a year raise to keep May in Ann Arbor for the rest of the decade.
“We love living here. The people, the culture, the diversity, the restaurants … it’s a special place.”
This story originally appeared in the November 2025 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
