George Washington University needed a few photos of athletes to decorate the side of a building this fall; the task of choosing those photos fell to a senior sports marketing intern, sitting in his temporary desk on the third floor of a Foggy Bottom row house. He thought it might be a good idea to highlight some of the men’s basketball team’s role players, and so he selected some possibilities.

“Well,” the intern’s supervisor said, attempting to be kind. “In this case, I think that we should use you there.”

“It’s like, ‘Okay,’” said a resigned Patricio Garino, who is both that marketing intern and the school’s most marketable athlete. “‘I’m not trying to be cocky or anything. But if you want me to, I’ll do it.’”

In this era of athletes who flock to sports management programs, it’s not unusual to find a basketball or football player interning inside an athletic department. But Garino — the 6-foot-6 wing who will attempt to lead the Colonials to a second NCAA tournament berth in three years — has more than a passing interest in the field.

He served on the board of the school’s Colonial Army fan club last season, going to weekly meetings and bringing posters into dorms to help promote student enthusiasm and better understand fandom. He met with the school’s golf coach last week, and is now the department’s point person for the golf program’s rebranding efforts. He runs weekly social-media reports for all of the school’s athletic teams, trying to figure out which accounts are performing best and why. He designed the online sign-up form for local grade schools that want to attend the Colonials’ Nov. 24 matinee — “just to tell us how many teachers are coming, if they want to order a pizza, if they’re bringing outside food,” he explained.

And he and the athletic department’s director of marketing and sales already have a half-serious succession plan worked out. When Garino’s professional basketball career is over, they figure, the director of marketing and sales will take over the head sports marketing position, while Garino slides into Chris Monroe’s current role. Yes, the school’s career leading scorer. That Chris Monroe.

Of course, Garino also thinks his current 12-hour-a-week internship might come in handy after he graduates in May, when he expects to turn pro.

“I think that would be a great pitch for a team if they want me: if you need some [help] in marketing …,” he said. It wasn’t clear if he was joking.

The 22-year old Argentine was already among the most prominent athletes on campus last spring, when he led the NIT-bound Colonials in scoring and made the Atlantic 10’s all defensive team. The offseason didn’t exactly hurt his profile. Garino accompanied Argentina’s “B” team to the Pan American Games, where he was hoping to “maybe get a couple minutes, feel the experience.” Instead, after an injury to his team’s captain, Garino was inserted into the starting lineup.

That put him in the mix for the ensuing Olympic qualifying tournament, where he was “just going for the experience of the training camp.” Instead, Garino made the team and wound up starting in seven of 10 games, as the Argentines locked down a bid to Rio.

Now, you have to understand what this meant to Garino. He was 11 years old when the country’s Golden Generation — Andres Nocioni and Manu Ginobili, Luis Scola and Fabricio Oberto — stunned the U.S. at the Olympics, and went on to win the title. He said he can “distinctly remember being in bed at 4 in the morning, crying, because they got the gold.” Now he was practicing against Scola and Nocioni — the two veterans on the qualifying roster — and being asked at a team dinner why he wore the number 29.

The reason was because his usual number — 13, in honor of Nocioni — was being worn by, you know, Nocioni.

“It’s very hard to describe,” Garino said of the experience. “Seeing them walk around, it shocks you a little to see you’re wearing the same gear as them, you’re getting ready for practice with them, you’re taking shots next to them. It’s kind of crazy.”

Garino logged the third-most minutes on the team during qualifying — behind just Scola and Nocioni. He guarded 2014 No. 1 overall draft pick Andrew Wiggins during a win over Canada. He averaged 8 points a game, despite being the second-youngest player on the roster. He now talks frequency with Scola, exchanges messages with Nocioni, went to Verizon Center to see Ginobili when the Spurs visited the Wizards, and figures to at least contend for an Olympic roster spot next summer.

The experience left Garino more eager than ever to play basketball full-time, but it didn’t damper his enthusiasm for his fall semester internship. He had entered George Washington hoping to study international business, before realizing “I totally hate politics.

“Being from Argentina,” he said, “our politics are incredibly bad right now, so I kind of took a step back from that.”

Which led him to consider athletics as a post-basketball career. He now talks with wonder about watching the ticket office print this year’s season tickets, and about helping them label the season-ticket envelopes. He got to choose the photographs to display in the rowing, swimming and cross-country offices; “that was pretty cool, I took pride in that,” he said. And he just received his first independent task: to serve as the marketing liaison for the golf team.

That means working on “marketing collateral” for the team’s golf tournament, measuring the dimensions for “environmental branding” in the team’s locker room, and meeting with the team’s coaches to discuss their motivational displays.

“I think they were a little surprised,” Garino said, describing his arrival at that meeting. “I know the coaches and everything, and they were like ‘Oh, can we help you?’ I was like, ‘No, I’m with the marketing department.’”

There was another double-take when a member of the golf team spotted the school’s best-known athlete.

“He walked in, and Patricio was feverishly taking notes, and it was like, ‘What’s going on here?’” said Nicole Early, the school’s assistant AD for marketing. “I realized very early on that the workload I thought he was going to be able to get through in his time here, he could get done in half the time. He’s taken on more than I even anticipated he would when he first got here.”

Garino’s working schedule will become less regular now that the season has started. In addition to his work with the golf team and the social media project, he’ll also remain involved with basketball marketing. Ask him about any highlights this fall, and he’ll immediately point to Monday’s home game against No. 6 Virginia.

“We’ve been marketing that game for so long,” he said. 

Of course, once the game starts, Garino’s role will change. He’s valuable to the school when he chooses photos for campus displays, labels envelopes and monitors Twitter accounts. Helping the Colonials knock off a top 10 team would offer a different sort of marketing.