New men’s coach Ficke: “We’re going to build with Colorado kids”

Sure, you can go home again, Big Bill Ficke told his son Dan when the younger Ficke asked him what he thought about taking the MSU Denver gig. But you might not be able to afford a home here.

“(My dad) actually tried to convince me not to (take it),” Dan told The Post on Thursday, tongue planted firmly in cheek, after he was introduced as the Roadrunners’ new men’s basketball coach, “because of the real estate market.”

The younger Ficke, who played his high-school ball at Regis Jesuit and later served as an assistant coach at DU, is confident he’ll get the housing thing squared away… and convince local talent to get the Roadunners, who play at the NCAA’S Division II level, on their radar.

“Jeff Linder, kind of, I think, really revitalized recruiting Colorado,” Ficke said of Linder, the Centaurus alum and former UNC Bears men’s basketball coach who this past winter took Wyoming to its first NCAA tourney in seven years.

“So I think Colorado, maybe it was overlooked for a little while. I think Joe Scott, who I worked for (at DU), he did it with Colorado kids and had a good run of success. There’s good basketball here. I think there’s really good Division II basketball kids here, where they’re right on that cusp.”

Ficke, whose father, Bill, runs Big Bill’s New York Pizza in Centennial and has been a local fixture for roughly five decades as a business owner, former hoops scout, and ex-nuggets assistant coach, posted a 61-25 record in three seasons as the head coach at Belmont Abbey, a Division II program in Belmont, N.C.

While at Belmont, his Crusaders qualified for the NCAA tourney in each of his three campaigns.

The new MSU coach went to North Carolina following stints as an assistant at DU (2015-19), Wake Forest (2010-13) and Loyola (Md.) (2013-15).

“We’re going to build (our program) with Colorado kids, first and foremost,” the younger Ficke said. “MSU Denver is so different than it was when I was growing up — just the landscape of the campus, the vision of the (athletic) department and of the university, as well. And so I think there’s a lot that’s appealing about (MSU) now.”

Dan Ficke is also president of the Joann B. Fricke Cancer Foundation, named for his late mother, who passed away more than a decade ago after a long, and mostly winning, battle with Non-hodgkins’ lymphoma.

And if Bill had any reservations about Denver’s real estate market, based on his smile Thursday after Dan’s initial MSU news conference, they were long gone.

“Doug Moe called me and said, ‘Your kid overachieved his genes,’” the elder Fricke chuckled. “As a father, it’s great. I get to see the grandkids more. And I get to see (my son) more. And my frequent flyer miles are gonna go way down.”