When Ned Golubovic started at Fresno State, opposing coaches worried about the kind of player he could become. Because the Bulldogs were still being punished for past sins, he and Brandon Webster were the players given scholarships in the fall of 2007. Right away, Golubovic was pleasant surprise. His shot had good form. He seemed to have confidence. He played hard and rebounded pretty well. The first recruit of Jeff Reinert, the new assistant coach who had contacts in Europe, seemed to be a success.

You know the rest of the story, of course. Golubovic did not develop into the player opposing coaches feared he might. He fell and hurt his wrists during his junior year and shot just 19% from the 3-point line. He played with tape around his wrists and around his thumb and coaches hinted that he was playing through a lot of pain, that Golubovic was a lot more injured than anyone knew. This season he came back healthy, but his shot was still damaged. He would admit the season of shooting with the injured wrist had changed the mechanics of his shot a bit. He made just 27% of his 3's this season.

His shooting confidence never seemed to shake, though. The shots would go up and his finger would point into the air the way it always had. But the rest of his game changed. He stopped getting as many rebounds. He sort of evolved into a 3-point specialist who unfortunately wasn't very good at shooting 3-pointers. His last game, Wednesday's loss against Nevada in the first round of the WAC Tournament, he played 19 minutes, had 1 point and 1 rebound.

But another thing happened to Ned Golubovic along the way. He became inspired to better his life. He was born into communism and then a civil war in a region of Yugoslavia that would become Serbia. His dad was a colonel in the military, his mom a secretary at a power plant. At the Serbian basketball academy he saw players who were more talented then he was, and he saw them disappear. It was a place where teenagers had to grow up fast, had to be able to motivate themselves and be responsible, sort of like going away to college as an 18-year-old. He saw one of his friends become a bouncer at a night club and Golubovic decided that wasn't a life he wanted. He wanted a plan and a back-up plan.

"Maybe at the time I didn't understand the magnitute of the decision," he says of going to the basketball academy at 14. "I had no worries in the world. But they expected you to be a man. It's big freedom and big responsibilities. A lot of people struggle with it. A lot of people lost themselves."

When administrators worried about a foreign student who'd been attending basketball school, playing on a Serbian junior national team and then a college prep team in Sin City, they were discussing the young man who would become one of the best students in the history of Fresno State men's basketball. This is the program that's earned the taunts of "Felony U," the program that's had academic cheaters and cash accepters and, yes, felons. It can claim a convicted murderer, an alcoholic, drug arrests, and a cast of characters that would take 10 more paragraphs to descripe. So giving Golubovic the title of best student is a little like calling someone the tallest worker in Charlie's Factory. But he was named "CoSIDA Academic All-District" as a sophomore, the program's first. It is a huge deal.

Then he earned the distinction again. And then again. Triple-doubles are rare, but not as rare as a three-time all-district student. Golubovic has 3.90 grade point average in psychology. Two weeks ago, he applied to Fresno State's master's program to study family therapy. If he gets in, and it would be the biggest upset in college sports this year if he didn't, he will eventually have to decide between that and playing professional ball in Europe.

In the long run, Golubovic did turn out to be exactly what the program needed. He was just one part of it, but during his four years, the team's APR went from a massive embarrasment to the biggest turnaround in college basketball. The program is stable again. It is still not winning, but the deepest wounds are healing. Golubovic's mom has figured out how to translate the articles about her son on Google and she tells him how proud she is of his work. Her son is the kind of person the coach's wives sit and listen to because he's interesting and engaging in a way that college students rarely are.

"All the [academic] success I've achieved," Golubovic says, "I've done it for myself personally, because I know it's going to put me in a better life. And it's something this program needed, and I wanted to do my best to put us in a position where we needed to be."

When asked if Coach Steve Cleveland can turn around the program on the court as well, Golubovic said he has faith.

"I think Coach Cleveland is the greatest guy in the profession of coaching," he says. "He will help you in any way you need. Any kind of problem, he will answer the phone 24/7 every day. He had great success at BYU. He has a great offensive mind. He is taking heat in the community, but you know how that is. My opinion is Coach Cleveland is the right man. He can do it."

It's what you'd expect to hear from someone who went to college for free because of Cleveland, but Golubovic says again that he is not just being polite or politically correct. It is what he believes.

"I'm almost done, so I can speak my mind a little more freely," he says. "So I say that honestly."

Webster, the other member of the 2007 recruiting class, didn't develop the way coaches had hoped and ended up transferring. So as of now, the Bulldogs' program loses just one player for next season. The coach and the rest of the players' futures are all undecided. You know how coaching decisions go. There are ripple effects.

Golubovic is the one thing we know at this point, the one senior moving on to the rest of his life. It's interesting that as his college basketball career ends, we are reminded of something important, that first impressions are often wrong.