Gophers men’s basketball coach Niko Medved will have five assistant coaches going into the 2025-2026 season.
In early April, Medved announced three new assistant coaches. The first being Brian Cooley, who coached with Medved for four years at Colorado State from 2021 to 2025.
He helped the Rams get to three NCAA tournament berths.
Before coaching at Colorado, Cooley spent six years at Wright State, where he spent the last four years as an associate head coach. Cooley brought the program to an overall record of 109-49, three conference championships and an NCAA tournament in 2018.
He also spent nine seasons at South Dakota State University and went to the NCAA tournament three times.
Cooley was just the first added to Medved’s staff, Armon Gates will also be seen on the sidelines during the 2025-2026 season. Gates has coached for a total of 14 seasons in his career so far.
Gates was most recently at Oklahoma for a two-year tenure and helped the team to an NCAA tournament berth in 2025. Gates also spent time coaching three other Big Ten schools.
He was at Oregon for the 2022-2023 season and spent four years as an assistant coach at Nebraska. Before being with the Huskers, Gates coached at Northwestern for five seasons.
Gates helped the Wildcats tally a pair of 20-win seasons and brought the team to their first ever NCAA tournament in program history back in 2017.
Medved is also bringing back assistant coach Dave Thorson, who will now have been with the Gophers for five seasons. Medved and Thorson also coached together for three years from 2018 to 2021 at Colorado State.
Later in April, Medved announced two new assistant coaches, Chad Warner and Aaron Katsuma.
Chad Warner was with Furman University for the past three years, where he started off as an assistant coach and was then promoted to associate coach. In his last season with Furman, the team finished with a 25-10 record, went to the Southern Conference Championship title game and earned a trip to the National Invitation Tournament.
Prior to Furman, Warner spent five seasons as head coach at Flagler College and eight seasons as head coach at Shorter University. Warner’s time as head coach at Shorter led the program to 156 victories.
Warner’s 13 seasons as head coach at two different schools led to an overall personal record of 228-154.
Katsuma is another assistant coach added to the roster this year. Katsuma is finally returning to his alma mater in Minnesota. Prior he worked at New Mexico for two years and helped them to back-to-back NCAA tournament appearances.
He is also reuniting with Medved after working together for six seasons. The two both worked at Colorado State together and spent one year at Drake together as the director of basketball operations and recruiting.
Katsuma graduated from Minnesota in 2014 with a degree in sports management. He was also a manager with the Gophers from 2010-2014.