It’s been a great fit from the get-go. I’ve had a great feeling about it. Hopefully we can a win a few games, get a few banners up here and make it to a Final Four. Anything can happen. It’s been a lot better than I thought it would be. – BYU strength and conditioning coach Bob Medina
PROVO — He certainly wouldn’t trade his mammoth sports resume, but this current gig may bring him the most joy.
By a great margin, BYU strength and conditioning coach Bob Medina is the most experienced basketball staff member at the school.
His ventures include a shotgun seat by the side of Jerry Tarkanian at UNLV for an NCAA championship and three Final Four appearances in the Rebel glory days. He spent nearly two decades in the NBA with the Portland Trail Blazers and Seattle Supersonics. He’s been to conference finals, worked and trained Hall of Famers like Scottie Pippen and Gary Payton, and fine-tuned Damon Stoudamire, Shawn Kemp and Detlef Schrempf.
Medina grew up in Sandy, went to Jordan High, and as a huge Ute fan, always cheered against BYU. Now, his days are spent trying to make Cougar basketball players stronger.
“There’re a lot of training coaches in the country and I haven’t been around a lot of them,” said Cougar freshman center Luke Worthington. “But I’ve never heard a player complain about a lift. We are all in when we lift with him and we believe in what he is doing. The stuff he’s doing really translates to on-court play.”
That stuff, including lifting weights, focusing on agility, flexibility and speed training, are things NBA players covet most. The pros, explains Medina, don’t get into extensive body building with weights. The NBA guys want to be fast, jump high and run as fast as possible in their endorsed shoes.
In 2013, Medina became part of a staff shift in Portland and began looking for another job. He thought it would be at another NBA franchise but a friend who knew a BYU assistant coach tested his interest in returning to college and Provo. He agreed to discuss it and the next day BYU coach Dave Rose called him on the phone.
“It was time for me to move on,” said Medina. “I kind of wanted to go a different direction. I think everything happens for a reason. I felt my time in the NBA was over. I felt God’s hand was in this. If I would have left it up to me, I would have gone to another NBA team. If he wanted me in the NBA I would have found another team, but I feel he wanted me here at this time.
“It’s been a blessing here," Medina continued. "Coach Rose has been great. All the experience I’ve had in the NBA I’ve been able to apply here and help these players.”
Having experience in the NBA and floating the names of players he’s worked with has proved to be a recruiting tool Rose uses when introducing prospects to Medina.
“Some of these guys want to play professionally and I’ve been able to give them some insight here if they do go that route," Medina said. "l give them some of my experience and share advice. It’s fun when they have recruits in here and when they learn that ‘this guy’s been in the NBA’, their ears perk up.”
Medina said since coming to BYU this past September, he’s grown to love his new job. While he grew up in Sandy, he is not LDS, but his wife is. While in the NBA, his time with players was fragmented because of so many games in a week. It was difficult to design a workout schedule with so much travel. When teams got to cities, players would disperse. At the end of the season, again players would go their own way.
Now he has a captive audience. His clients, BYU varsity players, stay year-round to train, and with only two games a week he can specifically build workout profiles for individual players. Tyler Haws needs specific things and Kyle Collinsworth, with his knee rehab, can use some other focus.
“It’s great to be here and give them that knowledge,” said Medina. “It’s important to our guys. They see they are being treated like a pro, like an NBA player, and they really buy into it.”
From the NBA to BYU?
Those are two completely different universes. The lifestyles couldn’t be more opposite.
Medina likes the change.
“It’s been fun. It’s been tremendous,” Medina said. Although he is a Utah native, he had never set foot on BYU’s campus before his job interview. He needed a GPS to find his way to the basketball office.
“From the recruiting standpoint it’s great. From a coaching standpoint it’s awesome. It’s probably the most fun I’ve had in coaching. Being at UNLV was fun. The NBA was fun. But every day, coming here with these guys, has been tremendous. They let me do what I do.
“Here, I get to ply the trade. I see them (BYU players) more than anybody. Every day but Sunday I can work with them and coach them every day.”
While the talent level is different (working with the world’s best compared to amateur college players), Medina said guys are individually different, people are still people at each level. Both athletes, pro or college, realize he is only there to help them. “The NBA guys took their ego out of it.”
Medina's high school coach at Jordan, Rick Bojack, first got him interested in coaching. After playing football at Eastern Utah, Medina transferred to UNLV and became a graduate assistant strength and conditioning coach with the basketball team. That became a full-time position with Tarkanian until 1991 when Tark went to the San Antoinio Spurs.
Medina and two other UNLV coaches then joined the Seattle Supersonics.
“In the NBA, not a lot of teams had strength coaches and it was a new thing. Payton and Kemp were young players. We just got through playing the Jazz in the second round of the playoffs and John Stockton and Karl Malone just manhandled them.
“At the end of the year, management and coaches told us in the offseason they needed to get stronger. They hired me and I was the first strength coach they’d ever had. They didn’t have any weights, so I made a weight room and got players into it.
So, what stands out about working for Tarkanian and Rose — two very different men?
“One thing about Coach Tark is ... we practiced until we got it right. Those were the hardest-working guys I’ve ever been around. Practices were an all-out war. Tark recruited guys who would practice hard. It made a big difference when you got to a game situation. The game would be over in 15 minutes because the way we practiced carried over in the way we played,” said Medina.
“It’s a similar thing here at BYU. It reminded me of UNLV because of the way we practice. We come to practice here and it is on. It is non-stop and it reminds me a lot of the way it was at UNLV. The tempo in the way we practice is the way we play.”
Although his job at BYU has been brief, Medina calls it a “great ride” to date.
“It’s been a great fit from the get-go. I’ve had a great feeling about it. Hopefully we can a win a few games, get a few banners up here and make it to a Final Four. Anything can happen. It’s been a lot better than I thought it would be.”
Dick Harmon, Deseret News sports columnist, can be found on Twitter as Harmonwrites and can be contacted at dharmon@desnews.com.