Come on, get up, Dusty May has something to show you. It’ll help explain little, bitty Florida Atlantic University’s journey to the big stage of the men’s Final Four.
“Hear that?” May said, pointing to the ceiling above the desk in his small office at Florida Atlantic University.
Hear what?
“Yeah, it’s quiet,” he said. “There’s usually a ball bouncing like a drum set — boom, boom, boom — when we sit here. You know why?”
He walks through the cramped basketball offices — pardon the heat, the air conditioning is out — and into the lobby of the 2,900-seat arena.
“Look it there,” May said, pointing at assistant Kyle Church pacing outside the arena doors on his cell phone.
That’s not what he wants to show, but it’s offers another glimpse into FAU’s rare journey. The coaches have a rule: If you get a phone call, you go outside to talk. Otherwise, everyone in the small office has to listen in, too. May has walked eight miles outside some days talking on the phone.
He takes a turn and goes up the concrete stairs, taking the steps two at a time, to the arena’s second floor.
“Here we are,” he said, entering an elongated room that used to be a yoga studio with wall mirrors when he took the FAU job five seasons ago.
Now it looks like a yoga studio transformed into a practice basketball court for shooting. There’s not room for actual five-on-five play. But there are some baskets for players to practice shooting if the main court is being used, typically by the other team.
“My office is right below here,” May said, standing under a basket. “So we’ll be working and we get the percussion drum of the ball bouncing — boom, boom, boom. Sometimes I’ll come up here and say, ‘Can you go shoot on another basket?’ ”
Does that help you understand what’s at work here? Can America begin to see why FAU isn’t Duke or North Carolina or, yes, this Final Four’s blue-blood basketball entry of Connecticut, with money and resources and tradition out the wazoo?
May has just finished practice, where an emphasis was on players using hand signals to communicate due to the expected noise at the 71,000-seat NRG Stadium in Houston. That capacity is more than FAU’s total attendance in going 17-0 at home this season.
That was a record attendance for FAU, too. The final seven games were the seven biggest crowds in school history, all over 3,100, thanks to people standing behind the last rows in the upper deck. Athletic Director Brian White said he was getting calls from people, asking, “What do you mean, it’s sold out?”
White stands courtside at practice and says, “We joked over the weekend [in New York] we had more people at a random watch party at a bar in New York City than we did at our games five years ago.”
They typically had about 200 fans at games when White hired May in 2018. There are other numbers to measure the past few weeks. The school website spiked to a record 100,000 hits twice during this NCAA Tournament. Then last Friday, entering the Sweet 16, there were 300,000 hits.
They’re waiting numbers from last weekend, said Lisa Metcalf, the school’s director of communications, as well as another telling number in coming weeks: Student admission applications can have a significant rise after a defining athletic run.
Then there’s the sight campus bookstore manger Cheri McLeod-Pearcy saw Monday morning. Twenty people were waiting for it to open.
“That never happens,” she said, noting they were swamped all day, even though the Final Four merchandise wouldn’t be all in until Wednesday.
May, at the center of this beautiful storm, has done more media interviews in the past few weeks than he did his first five years. CBS and ESPN set up cameras on Monday. But nothing told him of his changed world more than his nightly stroll around his Boca Raton neighborhood with his wife, Anna.
Normally a quiet walk, people have streamed out of houses the past couple of weeks to greet and congratulate them.
“It was great, though my wife said, ‘I kind of liked being anonymous,’ ” May said.
May’s run is a transforming one for him and the school. The only question is how transforming. Penn State, among other schools, is looking for a coach. May is a hot commodity. So are some of his players, who the coach admitted already are being recruited by other schools.
That’s for tomorrow. The Final Four is next, and May finished practice Monday with a question for his team at center court.
“Why are we still here?” he asked.
This wasn’t some trick question. He wanted his players to think of the ingredients they’ll rely on again.
“Because of our brotherhood,” forward Giancarolo Rosado said.
“Toughness,” guard Bryan Greenlee said.
“Scrappiness,” forward Brandon Weatherspoon said.
Down the line they went, throwing out ideas. May swept the answers together with one word, “Intangibles.”
Every surviving team has the tangibles of talent. These intangibles are as central to FAU’s story heading to the Final Four, May thinks, as the sight of coaches talking outside on cell phones and the percussive boom-boom-boom from the coach’s ceiling.
