FORT COLLINS — “Does that make sense for everyone?” Niko Medved asked.

J.R. Blount quickly answered “Yes.”

Dave Thorson made eye contact with his boss for a silent affirmation.

Ali Farokhmanesh, though, sat quietly, staring up at the projector screen, his face grimacing with more teeth than an awkward emoji. He didn’t need to speak. His expression said it all.

Yeesh.

“Ali?” Medved, Colorado State’s first-year basketball coach, asked in this film session with his assistants.

“I – It’s fine,” Farokhmanesh responded.

“No,” Medved fired back, “I want to know what you see up there.”

To understand the significance of an otherwise mundane detail of two days spent embedded with the CSU basketball team requires an awareness of where this program was nine months ago – the end of a six-year stagnation. As much as no one around here wants to discuss the regime of former coach Larry Eustachy — who was ousted after years of using excessive derogatory language toward players and staff and erratic behavior including occasional bans of assistants from the locker room for having discerning opinions — acknowledging his reign is necessary to appreciate the relevance of what’s happening.

On this day, just after 9 a.m. on the eve of this staff’s first game, CSU’s coaches have been watching film of Colorado Christian’s Princeton-style offense. The Cougars aren’t a particularly athletic team — nor are they a particularly good team — but they are a tricky team. The topic of the moment was deciding how to guard screen-the-screener and Farokhmanesh was worried about leaving Hackenthal open in the corner. “Hackenthal” would be tossed around 10 more times as Farokhmanesh explained how he thought the Rams should defend. Who Hackenthal is isn’t important. (Medved didn’t know, either, until finally catching on that it was No. 14.) What does matter is that Medved engaged in this exchange for 20 minutes before finally pulling rank.

It wasn’t that Farokhmanesh was wrong in his assessment. He wasn’t, and Medved told him as much. The problem was that CSU would have two starters suspended Wednesday, another waiting for his NCAA transfer waiver to clear and another out for the season recovering from knee surgery. Two true freshmen were starting, and only one guard was available off the bench. Farokhmanesh’s assessment wasn’t wrong; it was too complicated. Defending a Princeton offense is a thinking man’s game, and you don’t want to think too much.

“I think it’s important as a coach or as a leader to make sure you get everyone’s input,” Medved said. “I’ll ask my assistants, I’ll ask GAs, I’ll even ask managers because I’m genuinely interested in what they have to say. And a lot of times, I’ll make sure I ask their opinion before sharing mine so they’ll be honest and not scared to speak up if their view is different.”

Under Medved, everyone matters.

***

“I sent Robbie a text last night saying I wanted to meet with him today,” Medved tells his staff, his voice cracking with a disappointed laugh. “Can you guess what he texted me back?”

In unison they responded: “What did I do?”

“With my history and being the knucklehead that I am, it’s always understandable if I’m getting called in for something like that,” CSU guard Robbie Berwick said. “And the funny thing is, I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, it’s just how I’ve been programmed. And with everything that’s happened here in the past, obviously, you never know what’s going to happen.”

Tuesday’s meeting with Berwick was one of three formal sitdowns he’ll have with Medved this season. Earlier that morning, Hyron Edwards was in his coach’s office for a half hour. Every player that agrees to play for Medved is subjected to these scheduled conversations that start with nothing to do about basketball, though the discussion inevitably leads there.

Their purpose is building mutual trust. Medved wants to know about his players’ relationships, their interests and how he can assist with those off the court. He kept the same routine at Drake last season and at Furman for three years before that. The only way he knows how to coach is to care, and by doing so, he said, it’s amazing to see how much more he gets from players on the court.

Achieving that trust has been an exhausting project since being hired nine months ago at a school Medved helped to back-to-back NCAA Tournaments as an assistant. This staff hasn’t torn down walls; they’ve slowly chipped away at a dam with a plastic spoon since March – and they’re still digging. Berwick’s resistance to be alone with his coach behind closed doors — an activity CSU did not allow with Eustachy due to probation for his behavior — isn’t a hesitation that’s exclusive to him. Nico Carvacho admitted even he, a 6-foot-11, 240-pound all-conference-caliber center, turtled the first few times Medved yelled at practice: “Yelling used to mean only one thing.”

But demanding doesn’t have to be demeaning, and everyone around the program expressed that’s where Medved shines. When each meeting concludes, he gives his coaches one final task: Find two players to single out and lift their confidence level at practice that afternoon. They don’t want to coddle – a point which Blount emphasizes before they depart – but to an extent, at least for now, they need a delicate touch.

“When we first got here, I don’t think we were coaching basketball,” Farokhmanesh said. “It was about loving them and trying to connect with them more than anything else. You could tell that was one thing that was missing.”

***

“Here’s the thing: Regardless of how much we game plan, regardless of how much we scout, are we going to make mistakes? Somebody’s going to get back-cut, somebody’s going to fall down, somebody’s going to not communicate a switch. But you know what? That’s OK.”

What?

At a 2:30 p.m. film session last Tuesday, Medved walks through the door at the Moby Arena auditorium to a standing ovation from his players and screams, “Hey, let’s go!” to fire up his squad before delivering that speech.

This has to be staged.

It’s OK to make mistakes? Focus on the next play? Just work on getting better? Against a Division II team?

There’s no way this was serious motivation by a major college basketball coach to a group 18-to-23-year-olds. This is the speech your friend’s dad gives when he’s coaching your 0-8 fourth-grade basketball team. Yet as soon as Medved ends his soliloquy, every mouth in the room gives a firm “yessir,” and focuses intently as Thorson cycles through tape of each Colorado Christian player they’d face the next night.

The following afternoon, in the same room, hours before tipoff … déjà vu. Thorson proceeded to quiz everyone on their defensive assignments, asking what their tendencies were, essentially handing out gold stars for each correct answer — and holy expletive, it worked.

“I may be loud on the court, but if you saw me play golf, you’d see that I don’t give a dang about anything but my family and this,” said Thorson, who was an assistant at Minnesota when Medved was a student manager there in the early 1990s. “I’m a competitor and I’m a huge basketball guy, but at the end of the day, I’m about people and relationships. The approach of our program is the development of people. We want great basketball players, but we want great people, too.”

Here’s a peek at Niko Medved’s first pregame speech as Colorado State’s head basketball coach. pic.twitter.com/qYvnm4DFZI — Matt L. Stephens (@MattStephens) November 8, 2018

The same philosophy is used in recruiting, and is unquestionably what made David Roddy, a program-changing small forward out of Minnesota, commit to CSU over the Gophers and Northwestern on Friday night. The Rams want a roster filled with integrity (Thorson argues talent can’t win championships if that talent lacks character), and that means coaches who hold themselves to the same standard.

Medved was about to walk into his office midday Tuesday when his staff alerted him to their latest recruiting 911. It’s one week before signing day and a student-athlete they’re targeting in ACC country is worried he’ll grow homesick in the Mountain Time Zone. Already on board to sign are Roddy, Jihaun Westbrook, a wing from East of Los Angeles, Texas point guard Isaiah Stevens, and Kiwi recruit James Moors. The 2019 class is already strong, but signing the player in question would solidify the Rams’ roster for years to come.

CSU has the potential to win a few games it shouldn’t this season, and next year it has the potential to reach the NCAA Tournament. But in 2020-21, the rosters thins, with seven seniors with starting experience scheduled to have graduated. This recruiting class has to deliver, no coach wants to be in a rebuild in Year 3, and the staff begins to spitball which pitch Medved should use.

“Maybe tell him you’ve played at Duke twice already, or that we beat Wake Forest last year.”

None of that is untrue. Once as an assistant at CSU and again as Furman’s head coach, Medved’s teams lost at Cameron Indoor. Last year, this staff – which all followed Medved from Drake – defeated Danny Manning’s Demon Deacons in the Paradise Jam. But he can’t bring himself to use that line.

“Look, I’ll talk to him,” Medved says, “but I’m not going to mislead him. If playing at (Miami) is important to him because it’s close to home, I understand, but I’m not going to make a false promise to him we’re going to schedule them just so he comes here. That’s one thing we can never do.”

***

“Do you want to read a book?” Medved asks.

On game days, these 30 minutes at home between team meal and warmups are about all the time he gets with his wife, Erica, their 20-month-old daughter Aly and a 90-pound German Shepherd named Blitz that makes them question why they pay for an in-home security system.

The book, cleverly titled “Musical Instruments” has few words, but the sounds it makes have turned it into Aly’s latest favorite. She brings it from the toy corner of the living room to her dad reclining comfortably in a black leather sectional and says “up”— the same phrase she’ll use when she wants to get down. Medved pulls her into his lap and they begin to turn the cardboard pages while Erica watches from behind the couch, hand on her hip, euphoric with a closed-mouth grin somehow illuminating the room better than the sun that’s starting to silhouette a perfect view of Longs Peak from their back deck.

This was their dream. She followed Medved to Fort Collins while they were only dating in 2007 when Tim Miles offered him a job as an assistant. It’s where they got engaged, bought their first home and it’s where they stayed when Miles left for Nebraska so that she could finish her master’s degree. And now five years after they left CSU so he could begin his head coaching career, they’re finally back to where they always wanted to be if they ever got the choice.

“This place is just that special,” she said.

Aly suddenly starts to feel the gentle tapping of fingertips and skirts away, throwing herself into the protective snuggle of her fur brother who’s laying on the floor. She looks back at her father, who just transformed into a tickle monster, and shouts “Bits!” making sure he knows this dog won’t let him get her. But he picks her up anyway, and she embraces him back with a hug, before he has to depart for campus to coach the first game of his dream job. And in that moment, it became abundantly clear that nothing witnessed in the last two days was a charade.

The fun dad Medved plays on the court to 15 college students isn’t a persona. It’s him. And when he quietly sneaks into the locker room 38 minutes until tipoff to give his team a jump scare with yet another “Hey, let’s go!” it’s because he wants to see them smile. Basketball is a game, and no one deserves to have the fun taken away.

Medved’s rapid ascension that turned around two historically poor programs in the last four years suggest a high basketball IQ. He was brought here to win, but culture is key, and the one he’s building is startlingly unfamiliar.

Under Medved, everyone matters.