Ivy League head coaching departures typically don’t happen in mid-July, but Monday brought an exception with the surprise announcement of longtime Brown men’s basketball coach Mike Martin stepping down to take an assistant coaching role at Michigan.
“Brown has changed my life,” Martin told Brown Athletics. “The relationships we’ve built here — with our players, staff, alumni, and the broader community — are so meaningful to my family. As a proud Brown alumnus, I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity to have led this program for the past 14 years and to have worked alongside so many remarkable young men. Brown will always hold a special place in my heart.”
Martin joins the staff of newly minted head coach Mike Boynton, Jr., who shed the interim tag and was given a two-year contract three weeks after the Dallas Mavericks hired Dusty May away from the defending national champions.
“Mike is someone I’ve admired for a long time,” Boynton said in a statement. “He’s an outstanding coach, an exceptional teacher and one of the best recruiters in the game, but more than anything, he’s a great person who truly invests in his players. At Brown, he’s built consistently competitive teams through player development and a winning culture, and those values align perfectly with what we’re building here in Ann Arbor. We’re excited to welcome Mike, Kristin and their daughters to the Michigan family.”
The move to Ann Arbor is a major shift for the up-till-now Ivy League lifer in Martin, a four-year starter at Brown from 2000 to 2004.
Martin was part of the winningest stretch in the Bears’ basketball history with a 63-45 four-year record, including four consecutive winning seasons, an Ancient Eight mark of 39-17 and a 2003 NIT appearance after a 12-2 Ivy campaign. By time the Agawam, Mass. native finished his collegiate playing career, he was ranked third in program history in three-point field goals (143), ninth in steals (113) and tenth in assists (232).
Following a year playing for Dart Killester in Ireland’s top division of professional basketball, Martin returned to Providence in 2005 to work as an assistant under his former head coach Glen Miller.
A year later, when Miller departed for Penn, following Fran Dunphy’s move to Big 5 rival Temple, Martin followed.
Miller, Martin and the Quakers made it to the NCAA Tournament in 2007, but the program fell on hard times and Miller was eventually let go in December 2009 after a winless start to the season.
Instead of giving the interim head coaching job to the more experienced Penn assistant coaches, Martin or John Gallagher (who would go on to lead Hartford and Manhattan), then-Penn athletic director Steve Bilsky went with Quakers’ legend Jerome Allen, whose collegiate coaching career at the time spanned a mere seven games.
After the 2011-12 season, the then-29-year-old Martin returned to his alma mater as the fourth youngest head coach in Division I.
In 14 years at the helm, 13 with active competition, Martin finished with a program best 171 victories, 38 more than previous record-holder Stanley Ward. In all, the coach amassed an overall record of 171-202, including a 73-109 result in conference play.
Martin’s teams made it to national postseason play twice, a first round appearance in the 2014 Collegeinsider.com Tournament (CIT) and a quarterfinal run in the 2019 College Basketball Invitational (CBI) Tournament.
In early July 2019, months after being named Ivy League Coach of the Year, there were rumors that Martin was on the campus of Holy Cross and seriously being considered to take over the job from former Princeton head coach Bill Carmody, but Jon Rothstein announced that Brown signed Martin to a long-term contract extension.
While Martin’s teams were often competitive for a spot in the four-team Ivy League Tournament era that began in 2017, tying for fourth place on three occasions, Martin’s squad finally secured its first and only appearance in 2024.
Despite being the No. 4 seed, Martin’s Bears entered on a six-game winning streak and proceeded to upset top seeded Princeton 90-81 in the semifinal. His team was up 60-54 with 27 seconds left in the next day’s final, but Yale went on an 8-1 run punctuated by a short jumper by senior forward Matt Knowling at the buzzer, ending Brown’s quest to return to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1986.
The coach arrived at the press conference by himself that afternoon, praising the Bulldogs and shouldering the blame for the team’s defeat. What stood out to everyone in the media room was Martin’s ability to be as gracious and humble in defeat as he was in victory the prior day.
In addition to getting an experienced head coach to help out Boynton, the Wolverines get an excellent recruiter who helped bring quality student-athletes to Penn and Brown, including All-Ivy standouts Jack Eggleston, Zack Rosen, Tamenang Choh, Jaylan Gainey, Steven Spieth, Nana Owusu-Anane, Kino Lilly Jr., and Landon Lewis.
Upon Martin’s departure, Brown athletic director M. Grace Calhoun announced that associate head coach Tyson Wheeler is interim head coach and Parker Executive Search will assist the university in a national search for Martin’s successor.
Wheeler joined the Brown staff as an assistant in 2022 and was elevated to the associate position in 2025.
Prior to joining Martin’s staff, Wheeler, was an assistant coach for three years at UMass-Amherst and eight years at Fairfield. He played for Rhode Island from 1994-1998, earning A-10 First Team membership in his junior and senior years.
This will be Calhoun’s first involvement in an Ivy League men’s basketball coaching search since March 2015, when the then-Penn athletic director hired Steve Donahue to succeed Allen.
As classy a guy as we will ever know in the Ivy League. Brown thrived under Coach Martin. Lord knows his teams battled my Tigers every night. We wish him the best and are certain he will rise in the coaching ranks in the future.
Brown”s arena just got a whole lot quieter