Only days after he accepted his first head coaching job eight years ago, Dusty May feared he may have committed career suicide.
He almost backed out of the opportunity to coach Florida Atlantic when he toured the school’s campus and saw the condition of its aging, run-down basketball facilities.
It wasn’t just that FAU’s gymnasium seated less than 3,000 fans or that it lacked a dedicated practice facility. The weight room was the size of a closet. The head coach’s office backed up to a janitor’s closet. The locker room featured a stained carpet and steel intramural lockers you’d expect to find at a high school.
“The people, the area, the campus at FAU, it blew me away how impressive it was,” May recalled a few years ago, but the basketball facilities “were still in kind of a time warp.”
May’s stunning rise over the past eight years is a testament to his talent as an Xs-and-Os tactician, relationship builder and roster architect. He has gone from detouring would-be recruits away from FAU’s outdated basketball facilities to accepting the chance to spearhead the NBA’s most intriguing rebuild.
Three years after guiding FAU to an unimaginable Final Four appearance, two years after taking over Michigan’s tradition-rich program and mere months after leading the Wolverines to their first national title in nearly four decades, May is leaving the college ranks. The Dallas Mavericks are hiring him to take charge of a franchise built around reigning NBA rookie of the year Cooper Flagg.
Michigan losing May to the NBA always felt like a possibility at some point, but for it to happen after only two seasons is a surprise. May leaves behind a roster ranked in the top five of many way-too-early top 25 polls, one that features an array of highly rated transfers and incoming freshmen to complement returning guards Trey McKenney and Elliot Cadeau.
For May, the desire to become a basketball coach dates back to his freshman season playing for NAIA Oakland City University.
It was then that the 5-foot-10 point guard realized that all-out hustle and basketball IQ were only going to take him so far. May transferred to Indiana in hopes of becoming a student manager under Bob Knight, an opportunity that has served as a launching pad for the likes of former NBA head coach Lawrence Frank, Duke special assistant Mike Schrage and UC Santa Barbara head coach Joe Pasternack.
As a freshman, May did, in the words of one of his fellow managers, “the grunt work.” He filmed practice. He did laundry. He prepared the water jugs. He laid out note cards for Knight to write on. He taped white lines on the Assembly Hall court.
When May demonstrated he could handle more responsibility, he took on more consequential jobs. He and his fellow managers worked long hours watching VHS tapes of future opponents and hand-charting their offensive and defensive sets, their out-of-bounds plays, the location of their makes and misses. Then they would provide that data to the coaching staff to help inform their scouting reports.
Where May stood out, according to fellow Indiana student manager Matthew Babrick, was his willingness to go above and beyond. He and Babrick delivered donuts to Knight at his hotel room the morning of a road game. He and Babrick drove to and from Indianapolis to pick up basketball luminaries who came to visit Knight at the airport. He and Babrick put players through voluntary workouts and worked at Knight’s summer camp. When the basketball secretaries were out of town during the offseason, he and Babrick would volunteer to answer phones all day.
The purpose of all those extras was the possibility that Knight would one day pick up the phone on behalf of May or Babrick and advocate for them to secure a position on another coach’s staff.
“That was what all the blood, sweat, tears you gave the Indiana men’s basketball program was for,” Babrick told Yahoo Sports in April. “You wanted a two-minute phone call from Bob Knight to your top college coach. And in order to get that two minutes, you had to bust your ass for four years.”
A recommendation from Indiana assistants Mike Davis and John Treloar helped May land his first job as a video coordinator under USC coach Henry Bibby. He then journeyed through college basketball’s backwaters, serving as an assistant coach at Eastern Michigan, Murray State, UAB, Louisiana Tech and Florida before finally landing the head coaching job at FAU at age 41.
The lessons that May took from working as a manager under Knight helped him grind his way up the coaching ladder. No, the perpetually calm, seldom-flustered May doesn’t emulate Knight’s chair-throwing antics or drill-sergeant demeanor. He has instead taken Knight’s work ethic, attention to detail and knack for teaching and blended them with new-school ideas about creating a supportive environment and turning mistakes into learning opportunities.
“Those are the things I learned most from Coach Knight, the preparation, the anticipation of whatever comes next,” May said during the Final Four in April. “Obviously there’s a fear element and a fear of disappointing him, so you wanted to be thinking ahead, you wanted to be on your toes, you were always anticipating what’s next. Looking back, I think that’s probably one of the biggest components of problem solving.”
In March 2024, May became the most sought-after college coach on the market after taking FAU to the Final Four in 2023 and following that up with a 25-win season the following year. May was already being linked to the job opening at Louisville. Vanderbilt was also firmly in the mix. Fans at Indiana were clamoring for the Hoosiers to cut Mike Woodson loose so they too could make a run at May.
Michigan’s courtship of May began with a secret meeting at a Fort Lauderdale hotel the night after FAU was eliminated from the 2024 NCAA tournament. Athletic director Warde Manuel, chief of staff Doug Gnodtke and search firm executive Chad Chatlos sat across a conference room table from May and explained why they thought he was the perfect fit for the Michigan job.
“I probably showed my hand too early because this was a place that I wanted to be,” May told reporters during his introductory news conference.
“Louisville is an unbelievable basketball school, but this was the right fit for me and my family. It just felt right. I’m a big feel guy, a big fit guy. From day one, this was one I thought matched me and allowed me and those around me to have the highest levels of success and do it in a way that we enjoyed doing.”
For two years, May did everything he said he was going to do. Michigan became the counter to college basketball’s small-ball revolution, overwhelming opponents with supersized lineups that featured multiple skilled big men.
Behind transfers Danny Wolf, Vlad Goldin and Tre Donaldson, Michigan won 27 games in May’s debut season, finished second in the Big Ten and advanced to the second weekend of the NCAA tournament. Success with those transfers provided a proof of concept for both recruits and NIL donors as May built his roster for year two.
Cadeau was the first to commit, giving Michigan the pass-first point guard that it lacked the previous season. That signing — and substantial NIL money — helped entice 6-foot-10 Morez Johnson Jr. and 7-foot-3 Aday Mara to also come aboard. May also landed do-it-all wing Yaxel Lendeborg after the UAB transfer decided to remove his name from the 2025 NBA Draft.
That nucleus spearheaded Michigan’s run to the program’s first national title since 1989. The Wolverines demolished their first five NCAA tournament opponents by an average margin of nearly 22 points. Only national title game opponent UConn managed to even hang with May’s juggernaut team.
It looked as if May would have Michigan contending for national titles for the foreseeable future, with plenty of returning and incoming talent and ample NIL money at his disposal. Now he’s instead taking on a new challenge of trying to build an NBA title contender around Flagg.
Eight years after touring the FAU facilities for the first time, he’ll do the same when he gets to Dallas.
It’s probably a safe bet he won’t experience the same case of buyer’s remorse.
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