Winning and Ben McCollum have been synonomous. “The work is the win,” he insists.

IOWA CITY — Ben McCollum was two years from being born the last time Iowa won a regular-season Big Ten men’s basketball championship, in 1979.

The new Hawkeyes coach, however, has won conference regular-season titles in each of the last 12 seasons. That includes the Missouri Valley Conference crown at Drake this year that followed 11 straight at Northwest Missouri State. So how does he go about trying to make Iowa a consistent Big Ten contender at the highest level of college basketball? Here are some of McCollum’s insights from a 1-on-1 interview with him Monday:

Q: What do you want this to be? And how do you get there?

McCollum: We want it to be built to where we can have sustained success. The only way to do that is to get the right people, and then to retain the right people. Initially, that's what we're trying to do, where we have a good roster of some quality transfers. And then you also build with high school kids that you can develop over time to where then you're always recruiting from within.

So if we can get to a point where we can recruit from within and get guys that want to be here and want to stay here and want to be part of something bigger than themselves, then I think you can sustain success and you can do it a little bit differently than most.

I think it's probably more important to get the players that you can coach and guys that you want to be around consistently, and then hopefully those results will then take care of themselves, which they did in the Missouri Valley. So fast forward to the Big 10. I think it's a similar concept. Obviously you’ve got to have a little higher-level player, but you also have to make sure that you get guys that you want to coach, and guys that can really build a foundation for what you know you want to eventually accomplish.

It’s not like a magic way to do it. You just take care of people. You communicate with them. You're really honest with them. If you have high school kids, you don't recruit over the top of them all the time with transfers. I think it's just the nature of being a good person. There's no like magic way to do it, you know? Just be a good person. Treat people the right way, tell them the truth and love them, and, yeah, they'll be fine.

Q: What is a guy that you want to coach?

McCollum: We like tough kids. Emotionally tough, physically tough, kids that want to be here, kids that want to serve their teammates, kids that essentially make Iowa proud.

I think toughness for us is more the emotional piece of it, because there's an emotional maturity that goes with some kids, where they're able to stay present, they're not too high, too low. They're able to genuinely put their heart in that place where they're trying to serve their teammates and want each other to have success.

I think it's more emotional than it is physical. There's a physical component to it, but it’s more emotional. Like a relentlessness. Can I go further than somebody else? Do I want it more? All the cliche things, and we really value that more so than anything else.

Q: Can you spot that when you're seeing somebody play a high school game or watching tape?

McCollum: You just kind of trust your gut. You just watch it, you just see it, and then that's it. There's just an energy about certain people and certain kids, and there's like an innate sense of urgency that goes with it. They kind of are so steady and so present in what they're doing. You just kind of get a feel for it, to be honest.

Q: What do you do for a kid who you have spotted as somebody you think will fit. And when you have them for four years, if you have them for one year, what do you do to bring it out of them, to fulfill what you saw in them?

McCollum: I think the first thing is you surround them with other like-minded people.

Then you actually care for them. In today's transactional society, I think that's pretty unique. I don't think you see that a lot in a lot of programs. … When you show that, people will fight for you and compete a little bit harder. Five guys (from his Drake team) coming here and four guys (from 2023-24 Northwest Missouri State team) going to Drake, that sends the message that we genuinely care for kids and they enjoy the program.

Q: How have you not had any drop-off in these last 12 or 13 years? (None of his last eight teams lost more than five games.) How do you sustain it to where there's no complacency, to where there are open ears and open minds all the time?

McCollum: It is 100 percent the process. What the process means, what I try to say — and it comes from the book “Ego is the Enemy” (by Ryan Holiday) — is the work is the win. If you can get excited about the work, that becomes the win. So winning and losing games is irrelevant at that point. So you don't get emotional with a loss, and you don't get emotional with the win. You’re steady, and just continue to get better, and you're excited about the work.

As long as you work better than the day before, that's your win. And so then you don't worry so much about wins and losses, because that's what creates complacency, wins and losses or external pressure or people saying you need to win this amount of games or this conference championship or this national title.

Well, I don't really control that, but I do control how hard I work today. So then you naturally are always urgent with that work, knowing that if I do this, I'll get the results that I want.

Q: The days when you were a Hawkeye fan growing up (in Storm Lake), Hawkeye basketball was like the only game in town. And you were swept up in that?

McCollum: Oh, yeah. I'm not sure why it can’t be that again. I think that's ultimately what you're trying to do is, you're trying to be as good as you can possibly be. I guess that's what we're looking for. We need everybody's support with that. It’s like ‘’Hey, jump on in right now and enjoy the ride.“

Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com