This isn’t a new revelation. This is a celebration of a well-known fact. The Thursday game between the Wisconsin Badgers and the Green Bay Phoenix in the Kohl Center offers a reminder of how good basketball has been in the state of Wisconsin for a very long time. One week before Thanksgiving, it is a time for Wisconsinites — not just Badger fans — to continue to give thanks for the basketball bounty they have received for over half a century.
It all started in 1965 at West Bend High School. A young man named Dick Bennett taught the freshman team. Ever since that year, one of at least three men — Bennett, Bo Ryan, and Greg Gard — has coached basketball in the state of Wisconsin. Gard carries the torch today as the bench boss of the Badgers, but Ryan is in many ways the central nerve center for the story of basketball in the Badger State over the past 54 years.
Ryan took over the Wisconsin program Bennett entrusted to him in 2001. Ryan, albeit after a messy exit, then passed the baton to Gard in December of 2015. Since 1995, these three men have guided Wisconsin basketball. None of them have failed in the attempt to establish a standard Badger fans can be proud of. Gard’s head coaching tenure through four years has made the grade. That doesn’t mean his career has already been marked as an irrevocable success, but it does mean he is on the right track.
The reason Wisconsin’s game against Green Bay emphasizes the need for state residents to give thanks is that while Dick Bennett didn’t spend an extraordinarily long time in Madison, his tenure in Green Bay put him in position to ascend to Wisconsin’s capital city and begin a golden age of Badger basketball which resulted in the 2000 Final Four berth. Bennett’s run at UW, flowing from his Green Bay triumphs, gave Ryan a foundation he turned into one and a half hugely productive decades. Under Gard, the Badgers — who looked so quintessentially “Wisconsin-like” against Marquette on Sunday — are still reaping the benefits of what Bennett gave them after coming to UW from Green Bay.
Basketball fans in the state of Wisconsin know the stories. They know the litany of names and places where Bennett, Ryan and Gard have coached. Nevertheless, let’s name them anyway, just to emphasize the depth and breadth of this proud legacy in the Badger state on the hardwood, dating back to 1965:
West Bend. Mineral Point. Marion. New London. Eau Claire. Stevens Point. Southwestern High School. Green Bay. Platteville. Milwaukee. The University of Wisconsin. Dick Bennett, Bo Ryan, and Greg Gard have combined — over the past 54 years — to coach 104 seasons of scholastic basketball (high school and college together). They not only grew the game, they defined it. They not only defined it, they sustained it. They not only sustained it, but passed it along to successors who could keep the flame from dying out.
The Wisconsin Badgers will welcome the Green Bay Phoenix to the Kohl Center on Thursday. Emphasize the word “welcome,” since this game is regularly cause for celebration of a well-known reality. The fact that scholastic basketball has been so robust and healthy in the state of Wisconsin for the past several decades shouldn’t make anyone take this sustained success for granted. It is always worth absorbing, savoring, treasuring, how good this state has it in the realm of roundball. Thanksgiving comes one Thursday early this week — why not have two Thanksgiving days in November of 2019?