In the Bondi Room at the Grand Sheraton Hotel, on the evening before his team’s game against Kansas, Stanford basketball coach Jerod Haase leans toward the MacBook Air to see his namesake for the first time.
On the screen, Jerod Dyke — a 20-year-old KU student — is talking about Haase in a video interview recorded two weeks earlier. At the KU-Stanford game in Allen Fieldhouse last December, Dyke’s family arrived hours early and changed their seats, hoping to flag down Haase before the game. They didn’t have much of a plan — other than screaming loud to get his attention — but Dyke still relayed what it meant to see the former KU player in person for the first time.