Director of basketball operations Nima Omidvar spent three seasons as the video coordinator at N.C. State before joining the Terps staff in mid-May.

Director of basketball operations Nima Omidvar spent three seasons as the video coordinator at N.C. State before joining the Terps staff in mid-May.

The bluish-gray walls are mostly bare and the floor is cluttered, but Nima Omidvar’s new office in the Xfinity Center provides a glimpse into how he earned the job as Terrapins men’s basketball director of operations.

Dozens of sticky notes and pieces of paper are pinned to a bulletin board hanging directly above a desk that has more sheets strewn across the surface. Most of the slips have to-do lists written on them.

The other notes laying around include lists of contacts. Omidvar, who graduated from this university in 2008, knows thousands of people in the basketball community around the mid-Atlantic, and he’s worked to tap into those connections since he accepted his job with the Terps in mid-May.

Lining the floors around Omidvar’s desk, meanwhile, are tokens from his young coaching career. There’s the championship plaque he received after leading the Jewish Day School’s junior varsity team to a league title, trophies from AAU tournament championships and letters from former players and coaches.

Omidvar, 28, enters his first season with the Terps — who started practice last week — intent on recapturing his past success by completing each task on his daily to-do lists while touching base with anyone who could help the team. He said he won’t stray away from those work habits. They’re what convinced coach Mark Turgeon to hire him in the first place.

“My assistants knew him … and then I made some phone calls, talked to some people,” Turgeon said, “and it kept coming back to how hard he works.”

Omidvar’s job entails arranging travel, food and other budgetary items for the Terps. But he also plays a part in promoting the team and observes how the program functions each day to try to identify aspects that can be improved.

He’s already pushed to install new graphics in the Terps locker room, converted a kitchen into his new office and finalized the team’s plans for flights and hotels before its first Big Ten season. NCAA rules prohibit Omidvar from recruiting off the campus or providing as much coaching as other members on the staff, but the Damascus High School graduate aims to accomplish anything else he can to make Turgeon’s job easier.

“I’d love to be a coach, but that’s not my job,” said Omidvar, who spent the past three years as the video coordinator for N.C. State. “My job is to be the best possible director of operation as I can be.”

The new role is Omidvar’s latest stop in what’s been a rapid rise through the coaching ranks. He began coaching in 2003 after injuries brought an early end to his high school career, and after helping at Damascus for a few months, Omidvar was offered the junior varisty coaching job at Jewish Day School in Rockville as an 18-year-old.

He accepted and led the team to the championship game against rival Saint Anselm’s Abbey.

“Nima had scouted and he was so prepared that he pretty much gave his kids Saint Anselm’s playbook,” said Vic Littman, Jewish Day School’s varsity coach at the time. “There’s no such thing as being overprepared, but Nima was as prepared as it gets. And this was junior varsity basketball, where you’re not playing in front of huge crowds.”

“They hold a special place in my heart,” Omidvar said of the championship squad. “That was my first team.”

But it wasn’t his last championship. Omidvar parlayed his success at Jewish Day School into a job as an assistant at Saint John’s College High School in Washington, where he coached McDonald’s All-American Chris Wright. He later moved onto work at Paul VI in Virginia and helped turn that program into a national powerhouse.

During the summers, he was building the framework for one of the nation’s most successful AAU teams, Team Takeover, which went on to win two national titles.

All the while, Omidvar was working toward his degree in economics, which he earned from this university in 2008. He also ran one of the East Coast’s premier basketball tournament and clinic companies, DC Metro Showcase, which helped him pay the rent for his College Park home.

“I still found a way to have a social life, too,” Omidvar said. “Maybe I’m wired differently, but I’m 24 hours. I sleep like four hours a day.”

In the rare free time he had during winter nights in the mid-2000s, Omidvar would slip into Comcast Center to watch coach Gary Williams and the Terps. Several years later, after stops at Bowie State and N.C. State, Omidvar has cemented himself as a key member on the coaching staff of a Terps team aiming to qualify for its first NCAA tournament since 2010.

Turgeon said Omidvar’s presence in the local basketball scene and his devotion to the basketball program made him an ideal candidate for the director of operations job. And Turgeon made sure to point out that he wouldn’t have hired Omidvar if he didn’t believe the young coach could climb the ranks and earn a job as assistant at a major college program.

“He’s got a lot of connections; he works at it; the kids like him,” Turgeon said. “There’s no question he’s on that path.”

For now, though, Omidvar doesn’t want to be anywhere other than his kitchen-turned-office.

He called the Terps his “trump card to any other job offer,” not only because he went to school at this university but also because he has a handful of family members who graduated from here. And when Omidvar moved from Prince George’s County to Montgomery County as a fourth-grader, conversations about Terps basketball helped him forge new friendships.

But over the past several months, Omidvar has avoided reminiscing about his days cheering for the Terps from afar.

There’s not much time for that. He’s got items he needs to cross off his to-do list.

“I’m very proud that I’m here, but at the same time, I’m not going to let the warm and fuzzy feeling of coaching at my alma mater get in the way of doing an unbelievable job for this program,” Omidvar said. “I’ve had my moment of ‘Oh wow. I’m at Maryland.’ I got that out of my system. Now it’s time to work.”