High school prospects or transfers? Michigan's Dusty May discusses recruiting strategy

St. John’s head coach Rick Pitino raised eyebrows when he said on the ‘Pardon My Take’ podcast recently that he’s planning to only add transfers to his roster for next season.

“This year, we’re not even looking at a high school basketball player,” Pitino said, explaining that “I don’t think you can win, and win big, with high school kids” in the current landscape of college basketball.

Every transfer was, at one point, in high school, but Pitino isn’t the only college basketball coach with a similar philosophy. Michigan’s Dusty May plans to “aggressively” pursue transfer portal players ahead of the 2025-26 campaign, but he doesn’t agree with Pitino that exclusively bringing in transfers is the answer, at least not for his Wolverine program.

“We don’t have a plan, per se, that we’re going to do this or do that,” the Michigan coach said on ‘Don’t At Me’ with Dan Dakich. “We’ve always had the motto that we’re gonna get the best players that fit us and that we’ll enjoy coaching and that will embrace the way we do things. And that could be prep school, transfers, D-II transfers, whatever the case; we’re just trying to find the right fit.

“Now, obviously we’ll recruit … there’s just a glut of older players, and usually older players are better players. So we’ll continue to recruit older, experienced, physically mature players over freshmen, but we’re going to recruit freshman, as well.”

Michigan signed three high school players in the 2025 class, and there could be more to come. The Wolverines are bringing in four-star guards Trey McKenney out of Orchard Lake (Mich.) St. Mary’s and Winters Grady out of Napa (Calif.) Prolific Prep. They also inked four-star forward Oscar Goodman, a product of the NBA Global Academy in Auckland, New Zealand, who enrolled early this semester after graduating high school.

“We signed a local player up here, Trey McKenney, who’s physically ready to compete,” May said. “He plays the game the right way. He plays to win, on and off the ball. He competes on defense. So, guys like that, we’ve recruited.

“Winters Grady, we took out of Prolific Prep — 6-6, 6-7 scorer. He’s physically mature. Oscar Goodman, a New Zealand player that is redshirting now and came in at semester.

“We’ll have three freshmen on our team next year, but they’re all physically mature, they’re all, I think, mature beyond their years as basketball players.

“We’ll definitely sprinkle in some portal, we’ll sprinkle in some high school guys. But no, we’re not gonna abandon recruiting high school players.”

McKenney is a McDonald’s All-American and recently became the 13th Wolverine to win Mr. Basketball honors in the state of Michigan.

“A lot of players leave states now to go play at the basketball prep schools and the circuits and whatnot,” May said. “He had a great situation, his high school program, his AAU program are both storied programs, where he was going to continue to improve and get better.

“And I think guys like that, that really appreciate the connection to something bigger than themselves, pay dividends later. We’re excited to add him. He’s a special kid, and he’s gonna have a big following here in Michigan.”

What Dusty May learned in his first season as Big Ten head coach

May was asked what he learned about the Big Ten in his first season at Michigan, and his answer wasn’t surprising given that he talked about it throughout the year.

“It was even more physical and physically demanding than we anticipated,” he admitted. “All summer, every time one of our players would complain about getting fouled, our response would be, ‘We play in the Big Ten. You’ve gotta play through it.’”

But Michigan didn’t do enough to match the physicality of the majority of the rest of the league or recruit to that style, even if the roster that May and Co. put together is impressive.

“I don’t think we were intentional enough at creating an environment of physicality every day, whether it’s pads. Everything we did should’ve had — there’s just no freedom of movement — just getting bodies and bodies all the time,” the Michigan coach said. “We didn’t prepare ourselves well enough.

“But also, we’re not built that way. We have a lot of guys that are very skilled and they’re finesse by nature, so it’s not like we recruited to it, either. We got the best players we could in a small window. But overall, we laid a really strong foundation. We learned a lot. I learned an incredible amount.”

The officiating is different in the Big Ten than other leagues, but the game of college basketball is moving more toward a physical style of play. May will make adjustments accordingly.

“That’s the thing — we’ll adapt to whatever it is,” May noted. “If the game continues to have more physicality, then we’ll recruit that way, we’ll practice that way. There’s just no point in complaining about something that we can’t control.”