Michigan women’s basketball not content with Sweet 16 as a goal

Dusty May knew immediately. Or at least the first time he saw his team in a gym last summer.  

He knew his men’s Michigan basketball team would be good. Final Four good. Title-worthy good, and certainly the best collection of talent he’d ever … well … collected. 

Kim Barnes Arico wasn’t so sure. The Michigan women’s coach also gathered her team last summer. She also looked out over the gym floor and saw the best collection of talent she’d ever recruited to Ann Arbor. 

Her talent was younger though, highlighted by three sophomores in Mila Holloway, Olivia Olson and Syla Swords. But it wasn’t just the youth that gave her pause. 

“Dusty’s mindset is a little bit different,” she said Saturday, March 21, at Crisler Center, ahead of her team’s second-round matchup with North Carolina State on Sunday (1 p.m., ABC). “I always am, ‘Are we going to be good?’ I’m always questioning how good are we really going to be. I think that’s the coach in me.” 

Oh, don’t get her wrong. She knew she had talent. Even as freshmen, she admitted, the trio of Holloway, Olson and Swords “were just different.” 

“When we headed into the first game of their college career in (Las) Vegas against South Carolina, I don’t know (whether or not) people expected us to lose by 30. We were in a one-possession game at the end of the game. At that point, I realized we had something special.” 

Still, did she see her group would be a No. 2 seed not even two years later? Hosting first- and second-round games? Pulling into the Crisler parking lot and seeing students waiting to get in? 

Swords, her star shooting guard, sure didn’t. 

“There was like a line of 10 people waiting to get in two hours before the game,” she said. “That seems like a small thing, but we were all staring outside the bus, [like], ‘Oh, my gosh, there’s a lineup to get in!’ Just special like that to make us feel like we’re connected with the student body and make us feel like we have their support.” 

Consider that a step. One of several Swords and Holloway and Olson and Barnes Arico want to take. Think they are ready to take, now that they are here, a victory from the Sweet 16. 

They’ll have to get through a much tougher opponent to get there than the one they beat Friday evening in the first round. Holy Cross was happy to be in the tournament, and said as much after losing by 35 to the Wolverines. 

North Carolina State isn’t happy to be here. They have a legacy, not to mention more size and physicality than Holy Cross. The Wolfpack employ two bigs – 6-foot-6 Tilda Trygger and 6-2 Khamil Pierre, the team’s leading scorer and a walking double-double.  

U-M has length but not that kind of length. Or size. But they’ve got skill – everywhere – and are favored for a reason. 

Michigan, as a program, has only been to the Sweet 16 two other times – 2021 and 2022 – so making it a third is no small thing. Yet it’s not where Olson and Swords and Holloway are looking to stop.  

“We want to raise the program to another level,” said Olson.  

They’ve done that all season, game by game, earning that 2-seed and homecourt in the first two rounds.  

Did Barnes Arico see that last summer? 

“Did I realize that we would be a top-10 team all season long? No. Did I realize that we would play some of the best teams in the country, the No. 1 and the No. 2 team in the country, to a one-possession game, with a chance to tie the game in both of those games? No. But I think sometimes this team, this group of young women … they continue to surprise. … I would have hoped that we would be pretty good,” she said, “but I’m really happy where we are.” 

Contact Shawn Windsor: swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him @shawnwindsor.