By JOHN BOHNENKAMP

IOWA CITY, Iowa — Ben McCollum said he grew up a fan of Iowa’s men’s basketball team and then he name-dropped Wade Lookingbill, Val Barnes and Mon’ter Glasper and yeah, he was a fan.

The guy who was born in Iowa City, grew up in Storm Lake, and who wanted to play for the Hawkeyes — “I just wasn’t good enough,” McCollum said — was now their head coach, and suddenly you felt life in Iowa’s program again.

McCollum is a winner — an 82% winning percentage as a coach, four NCAA Division II national championships at Northwest Missouri State, 31 wins and Missouri Valley Conference regular-season and tournament titles this season at Drake — and Tuesday’s press conference was his first triumph with the Hawkeyes.

Winning that first day is usually a fleeting moment, but this one will stick with Iowa fans, and the program, for a while.

This is a job that you felt McCollum wanted for all of the right reasons. Going from Drake to Iowa wasn’t a move just for moving’s sake, a pursuit for more money or prestige.

McCollum wanted this job because he wanted to be a Hawkeye.

“I didn’t get to play for them, but now I get to coach them and hopefully bring success here,” McCollum said.

As McCollum went through the names of the players he watched as a kid, he brought up Chris Street, the magnificent Hawkeye whose life was cut short in an automobile accident in 1993.

How McCollum’s Hawkeyes are going to play, the coach said, was just like the way Street played.

“Like just with the intensity, the energy, the effort, the enthusiasm, the joy, the servant mentality, the toughness,” McCollum said. “Everything that Iowa stands for is what our team is going to look like.”

McCollum was the choice for athletics director Beth Goetz all along. Goetz reached out to McCollium a couple of times in the first days after the firing of Fran McCaffery, but after those conversations, he said, he told her he had to concentrate on Drake being in the NCAA Tournament.

Only after the Bulldogs were eliminated by Texas Tech on Saturday night did Goetz and McCollum begin serious discussions, and that’s something that had an impact with McCollum.

“It was kind of a short process because of how long Beth allowed me to coach my team,” he said. “And, again, I appreciate that about as much as anything, and it also says what kind of athletic director she is. She’s trying to build something bigger than just a transactional conversation. So we’re going to fight for her. We’re going to fight for the University of Iowa because of a lot of that.”

The sun was shining outside Carver-Hawkeye Arena on Tuesday, a welcome warmth from the gloomy season that just ended a couple of weeks earlier. Iowa won 17 games with a hard-fighting team that always seemed a player or two short, and that was the reality in a season in which leading scorer and rebounder Owen Freeman and freshman Cooper Koch suffered season-ending injuries and everyone else, it seemed, was dealing with some sort of health issue. And with the arena usually half-full on most nights, it was time for a change.

McCollum was greeted outside before the press conference by Iowa cheerleaders and approximately 75 students wearing white shirts and gold ties, playing off the white shirt/blue tie look that McCollum wore this season.

“Love the ties,” McCollum said, acknowledging the cheerleaders standing near the podium for the press conference. “Look great.”

His next wish is a packed arena, another memory from when McCollum was growing up and Carver-Hawkeye rocked.

“That’s our goal, to get Carver-Hawkeye filled back up,” McCollum said. “To create an environment where other fans want to come, and to be the best venue in the state of Iowa. We’re going to fight for that, we’re going to compete for that. We’ve done that at other schools, and we’re going to do that here.”

McCollum built a new team almost from scratch at Drake in the last offseason, and he’ll have to do that here. Most of the players who would be returning are in the NCAA’s transfer portal, and McCollum said they’re welcome to come back.

Iowa isn’t blessed with the NIL money so many other Big Ten teams have, but McCollum understands that cash isn’t always king.

“Tough kids win,” he said. “Connected groups win. Groups that serve each other win. Kids that work with a level of humility win. And that hasn’t changed. So with the portal you have to make sure you can identify those intangible talents very early, because the physical gifts are pretty easy to identify.

“But as you see throughout the portal, some of the teams that may spend the most money or on paper may have the most talent don’t necessarily win because they’re not a connected group.”

You can’t complicate winning, McCollum said, and there’s nothing complicated about what he wants his teams to do. “Impose your will” was a motto he has carried from Northwest Missouri State, and it worked at Drake as well.

“We try to have it permeate our whole program,” he said. “It’s just an attack mentality, it creates that level of urgency that we need.”

McCollum won the moment, won the day. The biggest victories, it felt, are coming.

“I’m blessed, man,” he said. “I appreciate everything. I appreciate the people that have taken a risk on me. I’m thankful for that every single day. I’ll make sure to not take this for granted. I’m going to fight for Iowa, and we’re going to get this thing going again.”

Photo: New Iowa coach Ben McCollum is greeted by students outside of Carver-Hawkeye Arena on Tuesday. (Stephen Mally/hawkeyesports.com)