In a season that will be remembered as the greatest in Michigan basketball history, head coach Dusty May has been honored with one of college basketball's most prestigious individual accolades. May was named the 2026 recipient of the Henry Iba Award, presented by the United States Basketball Writers Association (USBWA) as its national coach of the year.

The award, announced Monday in St. Louis, caps a storybook second year for May in Ann Arbor. He engineered a historic campaign that saw the Wolverines cut down the nets for the first time since 1989, culminating in the program's second-ever national championship. The journey included a program-record 37 victories, an outright Big Ten regular-season title, and a coveted No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament.

During the USBWA awards ceremony, May was quick to deflect praise onto his team and staff. He highlighted a collective mindset where individual ambitions were set aside for a common goal. "It was just a team that everyone was capable of doing so much more than they did, and that's what made it so rewarding," May said. He emphasized the authentic camaraderie within the squad, noting, "These guys showed more love in private than they did in public and that became contagious."

This victory places May in elite company at Michigan, joining Johnny Orr (1976) and Juwan Howard (2021) as the only Wolverines coaches to win the USBWA award. He is also the first Big Ten coach to receive the honor since Howard.

The Henry Iba Award adds to a haul of national recognition for May, who was also a finalist for the Naismith Coach of the Year Award. That honor went to Arizona's Tommy Lloyd, whose Wildcats fell to May's Wolverines in an epic Final Four showdown just a day before the ceremony. Lloyd himself paid tribute to May's remarkable season during his own acceptance speech, a classy nod to the coach who had just bested him on the sport's biggest stage.

For Michigan fans and the college basketball world, Dusty May's award is a fitting tribute to a masterful coaching performance that restored a blue-blood program to the pinnacle of the sport.