Wisconsin Coach Bo Ryan Builds Successful Teams with Fundamentals

Below is an article from The Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel on Bo Ryan and how he has built his program based on discipline and fundamentals.

Indianapolis — What's Bo Ryan's secret? Barry Alvarez, the University of Wisconsin athletic director, gets asked that a lot. People want to know how Ryan does it, how he wins and wins with players some big-time college basketball programs wouldn't touch, how his teams consistently display toughness and character.

Since Wisconsin hired him in 2001, Ryan has won 357 games and has made 14 consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances despite having successfully recruited exactly one McDonald's All-American.

Over that span, Duke, the team Wisconsin faces in the national championship game Monday night, has put more than 30 high school All-Americans on the court.

Going back further, Ryan has had one losing season as a college head coach — his first at UW-Platteville (1984-'85). His career winning percentage is .765. He's averaged 25.5 victories per year at Wisconsin, and this year's team has won 36.

How has Ryan done it? How has he fashioned such an exceptional record with class after class of gritty, lightly recruited Midwestern try-hards, with the occasional Devin Harris or Sam Dekker thrown in to sweeten the mix?

His secret, Alvarez said, was on display when the Badgers practiced last week at Lucas Oil Stadium.

"I watched his practice and they started out doing basic dribbling drills," Alvarez said. "I love his consistency. There's no compromise. He's a teacher, and he's going to teach the fundamentals."

That's it, really. Ryan is a teacher first and an X's and O's guy second. The court, baseline to baseline, is his classroom. The 101 lessons are "Basics of Offensive Efficiency," "Fundamentals of Foul Avoidance," "Art of Sharing the Ball" and "Science of End-Game Principles: Why Making Free Throws Matters."

"There's no magic wand or pixie dust we sprinkle over guys," said Badgers associate head coach Greg Gard. "We show them the process and what the plan is and here's how we do things day by day, year by year — how we practice, how we prepare, how we work in the off-season, what we do in the weight room, how we handle our preseason conditioning.

"It's the culture and the philosophy and the understanding of the program."

Ryan didn't happen to stumble upon this recipe. He formulated it as he climbed through the coaching ranks, including stops at a junior high school and high school in Pennsylvania, eight years as an assistant under Bill Cofield at UW, a dominant era at UW-Platteville and two years at UW-Milwaukee before then-Wisconsin athletic director Pat Richter hired him.

Ryan paid his dues, and then some. But he never stopped learning. And he never stopped teaching.

Jack Bennett, then a high school coach, remembers sitting transfixed at a coaching clinic in the 1980s as Ryan conducted an hours-long seminar on the finer points of passing the basketball, subject matter some coaches might have covered in a matter of minutes. With Ryan, the minutiae mattered: You bounce-pass the ball at this angle, not that one.

By the time Bennett became the head coach at UW-Stevens Point in the mid-1990s, Ryan had established Platteville as a Division III powerhouse, winning four national titles in a nine-year span and compiling a 138-8 record over his last five seasons.

"When I took the job, we wanted to pattern our philosophy after the way Platteville had done it," Bennett said.

Bennett went on to win back-to-back Division III titles before retiring.

But when Ryan was hired at Wisconsin to replace Jack's brother, Dick Bennett, who had suddenly retired a few games into the 2000-'01 season (and had been replaced by Brad Soderberg on an interim basis), the players initially weren't sure what to make of the my-way-or-the-highway native of Chester, Pa.

"It was kind of a shock when Dick left," said Charlie Wills, a member of the Badgers' 2000 Final Four team. "We weren't sure what was going to happen and what the future of the program would be.

"But when we got to know coach Ryan, we knew we were going to stay on the right track."

Call Ryan stubborn or call him smart, but he stuck to his principles at Wisconsin. They worked at every level. Why wouldn't they work at the highest level, against the best teams in the land?

"The game doesn't change," said Gard, who grew up on a hog farm in Cobb, Wis. (pop. 456) — can you say blue-collar? — and has been with Ryan for more than two decades. "The stage gets bigger and brighter and all those type of things when you go levels up. But the game is still the same.

"We're using the same terminology we used in Platteville all those years. Our preparation is the same. Our guys are a little bigger than what they were at that stage, but how they handle it as young men and young adults is still the same. It's still 18- to 23-year-old kids and we're trying to get them better every day."

Gard calls Wisconsin "one of the best developmental programs in the nation," and that's probably being modest. Hardly anyone heard of Frank Kaminsky two years ago and now he's the college player of the year.

"If they buy in and they're willing to listen and work hard with their teammates, then you have a chance to have good things happen," Gard said. "As Bo always says, if you have more questions than answers, we can show you the way."

If there's a down side to Ryan's system, it's that his teams have sometimes been criticized for being too methodical, for sticking to a grinding halfcourt offense in an era of blow-up-the-scoreboard. They've been called, ahem, disciplined, a code word for a team that lacks athleticism.

Before the Elite Eight, UW players were asked how Arizona's players might describe them.

"White guys," Kaminsky deadpanned, expressing in a joking manner how many college basketball fans — if we're going to be honest — would describe the Badgers.

"We're not a flashy run-and-gun type team," Wills said. "It's not that we don't have athletes. You can't say that Sam Dekker and Frank Kaminsky aren't athletes. To me, it's pure basketball. It's running an offense, being patient, having determination and knowing how to stay calm in tough moments."

On Sunday, Ryan was asked whether his team finally was changing the perception of UW basketball.

"I don't know, because I don't hang around people that never say anything other than, 'Man, your guys are pretty good. They're pretty efficient,'" he said. "I only hear that these guys are pretty good and that they can score, they can defend, they can play.

"So when people tell me about perception, I don't know what you're referring to other than it must not be that these guys are good. Is it? I don't know. Somebody would have to explain to me that a team that averages 1.2-something points per possession isn't a pretty good team."

But Ryan is having fun, too. He's even learned — there's that word again — to tolerate his players' goofiness, which surfaces daily in some form or other and has been chronicled throughout the NCAA Tournament.

In describing the difference between Platteville's first national title in 1991 and this NCAA Tournament final, the 67-year-old Ryan said, "Training table meal was hot dogs. The morning of the game, I had a cream doughnut and a diet pop. Now we have the best — French toast, pancakes, omelets. We have people cooking omelets. What else do we have? Bacon, turkey, all the fruit you could possibly think of eating."

Ryan gestured at the roomful of reporters.

"I think there was a stringer, one stringer from the Madison paper, that actually showed up and covered the (1991) game," he said. "So you ask me what it was like. It wasn't like this."

If nothing else, the Badgers' march to the championship game has helped many fans understand what the coaching fraternity and people in Wisconsin have known for years: Ryan can flat-out coach.

"Bo is just now finally getting the credit he deserves," Richter said. "I think in the coaching ranks he's had it all along. People are saying this could be the best four coaches in the Final Four ever, and Bo is right there with them."

Still, for all he has accomplished, Ryan reportedly did not get enough votes to be elected into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. The inductees, expected to be announced Monday, include Kentucky's John Calipari.

It's the same John Calipari, who, in the closing seconds of his team's loss to Wisconsin Saturday night, turned to his assistants and frantically shouted, over the din in Lucas Oil Stadium, "What do we do?"

Imagine if the roles had been reversed. Imagine Ryan, sweating and panicking, with a roster full of McDonald's All-Americans and without a plan.

It would never happen. Not in a million years.