Dusty May wanted to quit hours after signing FAU contract; now he's coached Owls to improbable Final Four run
Though they claimed to believe this moment would come, its arrival has many in FAU colors staggering about in disbelief. Wardrobe changes seem to stoke the shock as reality sets in. Now they're wearing their Final Four hats and shirts, blending into a euphoric tableau.
Two FAU players, Johnell Davis and Mike Forrest, find themselves stumbling for explanations 😂 halfway through interviews. Twenty feet off, 7-foot-1 center of attention Vlad Goldin is crying at one corner of the court.
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All this, almost five years to the day after her husband thought he'd made the biggest mistake of his life.
Dusty May opened the door, looked at Anna and broke down into tears.
It's March 2018. May had signed FAU's contract that made him a first-time head coach just a few hours earlier.
And here he was, bawling in a hotel room, trying to figure out a way to back out of the deal.
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May admits to having an impulsive personality. He wanted the job, then he didn't want the job. He signed the contract before ever seeing FAU's basketball facilities. Once he did, panic set in.
😆
The meeting with athletic director Brian White, who at that point wasn't even a week into his new job at FAU, was so good that May agreed to be the Owls' coach just hours after arriving in Boca Raton, Florida.
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May had no agent, so almost purely on vibes and the temperature in the air, he put pen to paper.
"At that point, I still haven't been to our gym, our weight room, our locker room," May said.
When he saw the gym, the weight room, the locker room, May was cloaked in remorse. He tried not to show it on his face.
The locker room had these old, ugly wooden lockers. It was exceptionally tiny. There was more square footage for the six showers 😂 than the actual space for people in the locker room. The arena sat 2,500, had an outdated scoreboard and looked superannuated. High school teams in the area were playing in better facilities.
May was freaking out internally. He wanted to go back to Florida and stay on as Mike White's top assistant. 😂
…"I would've left and went back to Gainesville after signing the contract if it wasn't for my relationship with Mike and his family."
"I would say Dusty experienced buyer's remorse, as probably a lot of first-time head coaches do," Mike White told CBS Sports.
So, Brian White dropped May off at his hotel. He wasn't back in the room but a minute before the weight of the decision broke him down.
"I'm not a big cryer," May said. "But I burst into tears like a baby."
…Brian was so close with Dusty, he would've almost certainly let him out of the contract if push came to shove. [Isn’t that sweet!!] But it didn't get to that point because of two people: his wife and Mike White.
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Mike White said [:] "That's the real part of it. "Him and I in the foxhole together. Uncertain days. Wishing we were sitting back in Ruston together."
Ruston, Louisiana, where the two of them built a sturdy Louisiana Tech program.
It took multiple calls between Dusty and Mike, his best friend in the business, in order to convince him to stay on at FAU. 😄
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[Anna] told him to toughen the hell up. 😂
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A couple days after May took the job, he used his connections at the University of Florida to help fill out a staff. Then-UF assistant Darris Nichols called Akeem Miskdeen, who was wiping snow off his windshield in Kent, Ohio, when he picked up the phone. Miskdeen Googled FAU and Boca Raton and thought: Hell yeah, I'd be interested in that. [Damn right. I can hang out in Boca for a little!😂] …
"When I got the job and I saw the facility, in my head I was like, I left Kent State to come to FAU? I left a real job to go to Florida Atlantic," Miskdeen told CBS Sports. "The first thing I thought was, Why did I take this job?"
[This may be the first time in the whole history of the Earth where Kent Ohio appeared like at the end of the rainbow compared to any other place.😂]
"The campus is a paradise, a mile and a half from the beach," former FAU assistant Erik Pastrana told CBS Sports. "If you didn't take anyone to the gym, it's incredible."
…the state of the place in 2018 was so piteous, the staff actually prided themselves on signing 10 players in their first year without ever allowing one recruit to see the locker room. They'd show recruits the football facilities…
"We'd avoid certain things and had to sell ourselves," Pastrana said.
It got so comical that a few of the first commits to FAU under May found themselves asking, "Coach, where's the locker room?" after they enrolled on campus.
They'd never even seen it.
"We basically said it was under renovation," Pastrana said.
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"This is one of the most special days of my life," [Mike] White told CBS Sports as he stood a few rows off the floor.
"We see today how special he is and this program he's built is," Brian White said of Dusty. "I can't believe where we are today. It's just incredible."
On March 22, 2018, the opening line of the FAU's press release read: "Dusty May has accepted the challenge of building Florida Atlantic University's men's basketball program into a team that will consistently compete on the national stage."
Turns out, that was a massive understatement. Dusty May has changed the image and reputation of Florida Atlantic University's men's basketball program forever, and on Saturday night, this job brought tears to his eyes yet again.
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Beautiful story written absolutely beautifully by Matt Norlander.
