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ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) — Basketball fans around the country are learning what those in Michigan and Florida already know.
Dusty May is a good basketball coach.
A year ago, the Wolverines fired Juwan Howard after going 8-24 — the most losses in school history — and finishing last in the Big Ten at 3-17. Not only were they 14 games behind conference-champion Purdue, they were four games behind 12th place Maryland and Rutgers.
Somehow, a new coach surrounded by new players has created one of the most surprising one-year turnarounds in college basketball history. Michigan went 14-6 in Big Ten play before winning the conference tournament and advancing to the Sweet 16 in the NCAA Tournament.
“I think we have a group of competitors,” May said on his weekly radio show. “I heard this years ago — and I don’t know where I heard it from or where I read it — but competitors figure out a way to win because they want to win.
“Sometimes, that’s early in the season, and sometimes, you don’t really have that until the very end, and then you just catch fire and it just keeps growing and growing and growing — because it didn’t happen too early, but it happened at just the right time.”
May came from Florida Atlantic, where he had led the Owls to the 2022 Final Four, and experts figured he would face a lengthy rebuilding process. None of his starters began their careers in Ann Arbor, and he had an unbalanced lineup that featured a pair of seven-footers in Vladislav Goldin and Danny Wolf.
Not everything has gone perfectly, but May thinks that has also shown the way his team has come together.
“To be honest, the things that really stand out are the guys that haven’t had the season that they’d hoped for or we expected — to see how much their teammates continued to believe in them,” he said. “In this climate when you don’t have deep, personal connections and years of equity and 100s of hours of work like teams used to back in the day, it would be easy to almost…
[ad_2]Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/article/dusty-may-saves-faltering-michigan-223858544.html
Author : DAVE HOGG
Publish date : 2025-03-25 22:38:00
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