‘We grew up Indiana fans’: Dusty May returning to Assembly Hall leading visiting Michigan

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ANN ARBOR, Mich. — It’s almost difficult to describe just how small Eastern Greene High School is.

So allow Mark Barnhizer, formerly the school’s head basketball coach for nearly a decade, to do the honors.

“Yeah, that’s about as backwoods as you can get,” Barnhizer, the father of Northwestern basketball star Brooks Barnhizer, said with a laugh in a recent phone call with the Free Press. “I mean, it’s a consolidation of towns and names — some that that aren’t even real towns. It’s just country kids.”

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Eastern Greene sits along E. State Rd. 45, almost smack in the middle between Bloomfield and Bloomington, Indiana. The school is in Greene County, just east of the Monroe County line, and Barnhizer remembers, back in 1991, counting down the days until an undersized point guard would reach the high school ranks.

His name?

Dusty May.

Of course, May is 48 now and better known as the Michigan basketball head coach.

Though May stood not much more than 5 feet and change at the time, Barnhizer had watched enough of his game to feel certain he could be exactly what his program needed; he had that type of demeanor.

“When he was in eighth grade, we couldn’t get him to ninth grade quick enough,” Barnhizer recalled. “We needed leadership and he was the answer.

“There’s not many 13- or 14-year-olds you’re banking your program on for leadership, and as soon as he got there, we got better.”

Had somebody asked Barnhizer then if he saw May — a few decades and a handful of coaching stops later — running a Big Ten basketball program and walking the sidelines of Assembly Hall, what would he have said?

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He can’t guarantee the answer would have been yes, but he knows it certainly wouldn’t have been no.

“We saw it, first day he was there,” Barnhizer said. “Now, you got to have breaks to get where he’s gotten, but thing is, I…

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/grew-indiana-fans-dusty-may-110950226.html

Author : Indianapolis Star

Publish date : 2025-02-07 11:09:00

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