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Just like he was able to do with his players, new Michigan head coach Mike Boynton Jr. wanted to keep the staff he was working with intact.
For the most part, he was successful, but he had some work to do to round out the remainder of his staff with people he can rely on and trust.
In his first hire as the leader of the program, U-M announced that it had hired Brown head coach Mike Martin as an assistant coach. The hire ticked a lot of boxes that Boynton Jr. was looking for, as he was able to convince a current head coach to leave his program in July for a new opportunity. Martin departed the Brown program as its all-time winningest coach in its history.
Appearing on the Defend the Block podcast this week, Boynton was asked about how he plans to delegate his time now that his role has changed significantly, and unexpectedly, from last year. He wants to lean on Martin's presence and experience.
"I think that's where I'll lean on the things that I've experienced both positively and negatively in my first opportunity to be a head coach," Boynton said. "I probably didn't know as well how to delegate, how to identify my own weaknesses, and have people who can cover those for me. Now, with the first hire I made, Mike Martin from Brown, a tremendous teacher of the game, a guy who's been able to do a lot with not a whole lot of resources at a place that's really challenging to win at. He's somebody that will have a great level of input in how we operate moving forward, particularly on the offensive end, but even just from a holistic head coaching perspective, he'll be somebody I can lean on to ask questions, to bounce ideas off.
"We'll move some other things around within the staff with the guys that we have returning, but we have great people still in the building who are really, really good at helping guys get better, teaching the game, being tacticians in terms of game execution, recruiting, all the things that it takes to be successful. And so I'm excited to work with these guys that we have here."
So why Martin? Boynton Jr. said it was the common ground during their discussions prior to making the hire official that sealed the deal.
While Martin's transition to Ann Arbor will come with new aspects, particularly navigating the NIL world and recruiting for a national champion, the basketball experience speaks for itself, and it's something that Boynton Jr. admires about Martin.
"It's not easy to do what he did," Boynton Jr. said. "It's one thing to do it the way I did it, right? I was not working at the time. Dusty gets here, and I still have to think about if that's what I want to do in the immediate, do I want to take some time off, but he's actively, in a position where he's got a very stable situation. He's well respected, the all-time winningest coach at his alma mater. He's got a family that's got great roots there. We're excited to get them all here. So we're appreciative that he wanted to take on this challenge, which is a great challenge, his opportunity to coach at the highest level, be a part of a team that's coming off of a national championship with all the expectations that come with that. And so the conversations were wide, they were deep. We watched film together.
Adding:
"We shared ideas about how we teach the game, the best practices on how to approach scouting, and how to approach player development. Some of the things that we do at this level will be new to him. I'm not sure they would necessarily deal with the NIL market the way we have been, the transfer portal market the way that we have been. But he's also coming from another highly respected academic institution. And so being able to recruit smart guys from great academic backgrounds is something he's going to be very, very used to. But also somebody, like I said, that I can lean over and ask a question that won't be foreign to him because he started as a head coach before."
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This article was originally published on www.si.com/college/michigan as Mike Boynton Jr. on why Mike Martin was his First Hire at Michigan: 'Tremendous Teacher of the Game'.
