Coaches set pace for connection for Michigan basketball, Saint Louis

BUFFALO, NY − With two basketball minds such as these, it's easy for time to slip away when lost in conversation. Like the time Josh Schertz, then the future coach at Saint Louis, visited then-Florida Atlantic coach Dusty May. Schertz, a Boca Raton native and FAU alumnus, had a trip home on the docket when he reached out to May for a meeting.

The two had other plans for later that day, but never quite made it. "It was immediately after one of the seasons, and [Schertz] said, 'I'm going to come through, we'll sit and we'll talk ball for a couple hours and we'll have lunch,'" May recalled Friday, March 20. "I think we were going to meet Jim Crutchfield [a longtime Division II coach] to play pickleball, and I think we ended up sitting in my office for 10 straight hours.

We hadn't eaten anything, I think we'd had a cup of coffee, probably a couple cups of coffee and some water. "We missed lunch, we missed everything. We missed Crutch's pickleball and we just got caught up and had notebooks full − I had a notebook full of notes and about a million ideas running through my head.

" Fast forward a few years, and now the two are nearing the pinnacle of their profession; they'll face off on the opposite sideline for the first time when 1-seed Michigan plays 9-seed Saint Louis in the NCAA Tournament Midwest region second round on Saturday (12:10 p. m. , CBS).