Gard earned Wisconsin's three-month test drive
Saul Phillips, the head basketball coach at Ohio University who was a bench warmer on one of Bo Ryan’s four Division III national title teams at Wisconsin-Platteville, was sitting on his couch late Tuesday night. He was poring over the tape of his team’s win a few hours earlier against Ohio Dominican and had the Big Ten Network on in the background, the volume low.
A struggling Wisconsin team had just beaten a cupcake opponent at home in a game few paid attention to. But still, Phillips always likes to keep tabs on Ryan, whom had Phillips on his Wisconsin staff for three years.
In Milwaukee, Rob Jeter, who played for Ryan at Platteville and was an assistant at Wisconsin before becoming the coach at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, was asleep. His wife woke him up. “You gotta come out here,” she said. He assumed it was something about the kids. Jeter was still disoriented when his phone started buzzing, over and over and over again.
In Chicago, Howard Moore, who played on Wisconsin’s first tourney team since 1946 and later worked as a Ryan assistant before taking over as coach at University of Illinois at Chicago, was live on camera at the Big Ten Network studio. Moore was breaking down the game the network had just aired, a 15-point Wisconsin win over Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, and talking about Wisconsin’s upcoming Big Ten opener against ninth-ranked Purdue.
That’s when a producer got in his ear.
They were cutting away to show the Wisconsin postgame news conference live, the producer said. Ryan has a big announcement to make.
In the television studio, Moore took a breath, trying to hold his emotions in check because he had a feeling what was about to come. In Milwaukee, Jeter’s mind began to process why his old boss was talking on live television so late into the night. In Athens, Ohio, Phillips turned up the volume on his television and was shocked at what he heard. “I think he’s trying to retire right now, but he hasn’t said the word retire,” Phillips said.
The timing had been a secret — people who’ve been close with Ryan for decades had no idea he was going to announce his immediate retirement after a ho-hum December game against a Southland Conference foe — but none of them really could say he was surprised by it. Ryan first brought up retirement in the offseason and had been wrestling with it since. Yet Ryan’s legion of former coaches and players still picked up their phones and called one another, sharing memories of the man who turned Wisconsin basketball into a national power as well as talking about the future of one of the most unique programs in the country.
“I still got some people that I have to talk to from the staff that I couldn’t get to because I didn’t want to say anything before the game,” Ryan said at the news conference, his voice wavering. “It is so emotional right now. I’m trying to hold this together.”
Yes, in the moments after the surprise announcement, the thoughts of former players and coaches from Ryan’s 31½ years as a head coach went to the past: the hours of fundamental skill development in the gym, the four Division III championships, the two undefeated seasons at Platteville, the remolding of Wisconsin Badgers basketball, the back-to-back Final Fours, the sideline scowls that ranged from unbelieving to unhinged. But they also rolled forward to the future and what Wisconsin basketball would look like now that the man who brought it to these heights was leaving.
The name they all focused on was Greg Gard, an understated, obsessively hard-working, 45-year-old native of a Wisconsin small town of fewer than 500 people. Gard has been the man behind the man since long before Ryan arrived in Madison. For more than 20 years, Gard has been by Ryan’s side as an assistant in Platteville, Milwaukee and Madison and Ryan’s associate head coach since 2008.
The former players who lit up their group texts, the former staffers who phoned one another late at night and into the morning, the people who were with Ryan from those anonymous Division III days up until the night this past April when his team played for the national title in Indianapolis —all were talking about Gard, the new head coach at Wisconsin.
Albeit with an interim label.
“If ‘deserves’ has anything to do with it,” Phillips said the next morning, still bleary-eyed from that night of text messages and phone calls, “he’ll get this job permanently.”
Ryan, who turns 68 on Sunday, wavered a bit last summer on when exactly he would retire — first saying it would be at the end of the season and then that he might push forward another year. Many speculated that was because Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez wasn’t 100 percent on board with hiring Gard, Ryan’s hand-picked successor. When Ryan retired in the moments after Wisconsin’s final game of the semester on Tuesday night, it was a gift to his longtime assistant: Gard now has an on-the-job, three-month proving ground to show why he ought to take over the reins from the man who never missed an NCAA tournament in his 14 years in Madison.
Ryan’s circle — people like Phillips and Jeter and Moore — seems united in its belief that Gard, one of the most respected assistant coaches in college basketball, deserves to take over for his boss. Part of it is out of loyalty to a man who made things happen during Ryan’s unprecedented tenure. Everything — from recruiting players who jibed perfectly with Ryan’s philosophy, to constructing the team’s schedule, to scouting upcoming opponents, to coaching players on in-game X’s and O’s, to serving as the director of the Badger Boys Basketball Summer Camps — was part of Gard’s job description.
“You can’t understate the impact he had on the Final Four runs,” Phillips said. “You can’t underestimate the total workload he took on. He’s performed every aspect of every duty you need to perform to be the head coach at the University of Wisconsin. He’s perfected it already. It’s just this big collective with all of us: ‘Go, Gardo. Take this and run.’ ”
The other part of it? Well, it’s simply that the understated Gard fits perfectly with what Wisconsin basketball has become: a national power not because of the number of McDonald’s All-Americans on its roster — Ryan had exactly one in his whole tenure — but because the program knows its identity and recruits players who fit.
“It’s not the sexy school; let’s be honest,” said Moore, whose recruitment of late-blooming eventual National Player of the Year Frank Kaminsky helped lay some of the groundwork for the two Final Fours. “It’s not the school with a rich tradition of Kentucky or Kansas. But it has great people there, a tremendous campus and an excellent academic profile to present to a young man who wants a meaningful degree.”
Take it from someone who knows. Joe Krabbenhoft played for Wisconsin from 2005 until 2009 and is now an assistant at South Dakota State. Gard was his main recruiter. He committed to Wisconsin before he even started his junior season. Much of that was because of Gard and his straightforward, Midwestern approach.
“He’s a branch of Coach Ryan,” Krabbenhoft said. “He shoots it straight. He’s honest. He’s very sincere. When I was being recruited that wasn’t always the case, but it was with him. We knew what he was saying was coming from the heart.”
There’s been a consistent message in the group texts former Wisconsin players have been sending since Tuesday night: that Gard deserves the full-time gig. Not simply because he’s been there so long. But because for all of those 14 years, as one ex-player told me, Gard has been “running the show.”
“This is just the right fit,” Moore said. “He’s born and raised in the state of Wisconsin. He worked his way up in the ranks in the state, just like Bo has. And he’s paid his dues. He understands the dynamics of that job, how to recruit to that university, the profile of the player you need to pursue, what it means to be an athlete at Wisconsin. He’s going to run the program the right way. The principles and philosophy of Coach Ryan from the past 15 years, he will carry that on.”
Gard’s elevation to head coach of this Midwest basketball power is as unlikely as Ryan’s rise from Brookhaven Junior High School outside of Philadelphia, where Ryan worked as a history teacher and basketball coach in 1972, to today, when he’s considered a surefire Hall of Famer.
Like Ryan, Gard was planning to be a schoolteacher and high school basketball coach. But Ryan saw something in Gard when the 22-year-old was working Ryan’s basketball camp in Platteville, and he hired him as one of his numerous student-assistants for the Division III school. At first, Gard roomed with a couple guys on the team. After a year, he was promoted to full-time assistant coach.
That was awkward: A guy who was the sixth man on his small-town Wisconsin high school team was now teaching basketball to a bunch of collegiate athletes around his same age, guys who fully planned on winning the Division III national title.
“From the get-go he was in a tough spot, where you go from being a peer to trying to coach your peers, trying to win respect of guys on the team — and he was able to do that,” said Phillips, who played for Platteville when Gard was first elevated to a coaching position. “You’re a player, and you’re taking skill advice from a guy you think you can beat one-on-one. He’s telling our All-American guard what to do. That’s a tough spot to be in.”
Phillips remembers one time at practice, when that guard was going through a skill drill. Gard, who was the same age as the player, watched the player do a post move Gard didn’t like. He pointed it out. The player looked at him and shook his head. It was visible disrespect.
“Bo was looking at it,” Phillips recalled. “And Gardo looks over at Bo: ‘You going to let him do this?’ And Bo goes, ‘I can’t make him respect you, Gardo.’ But by the end of that year, Gardo is telling this guy what to do and this guy does it. Like that moment never happened. To do that is so, so impressive.”
Greg Gard was one of the first to know.
It was mid-afternoon Tuesday, hours before more than 17,000 people watched what they had no idea would be the final win of the 747 in Ryan’s college coaching career.
But even then, Ryan didn’t know for sure. He told his longtime assistant that he was leaning toward retiring after that night’s game. Probably. He still needed time to think it over.
Wednesday afternoon, Greg Gard took the podium as Wisconsin's head coach for the first time.
“It really weighed his mind the last six months, maybe even longer,” Gard told FOXSports.com on Wednesday. “I’ve had plenty of other conversations with him about that. I always stressed to him that it had to be his decision and when he felt he was ready. There’s 100 books in this profession on how to start your career, but I haven’t seen any manuals yet on how to get out of it.”
The players didn’t know when they took the floor. They didn’t know it as three of them were scoring in double figures in a typical 64-49 Bo Ryan win. They didn’t know it as they went through the handshake line at the Kohl Center.
Then the door closed to the locker room, and Ryan told the players he was stepping down immediately, and the emotions flew loose.
“Last night was very important, important for us to be thankful and grateful for our experiences with Coach Ryan,” Gard said. “We’re all very fortunate to have had an experience with Coach Ryan, whether it was six months for these freshmen or 23 years for myself. I had 23 years with one of the greatest coaches to ever coach this game. It was very hard for him to talk to the team last night; emotional for everyone involved.”
Tuesday night was about Bo Ryan. But Wednesday was about Greg Gard. He spoke to the team again, this time without Ryan at his side. He knew the transition was of vital importance because one of the most important things behind Wisconsin basketball’s success has been the near-total lack of transitions over the past 14 years.
“This is maybe first time the apple cart was tipped over here, because there’s been very, very little change,” Gard told FOXSports.com. “People who’ve been here have known nothing but stability, which is what has made this program so successful. There’s a culture and process established here. We know what makes this place tick.”
I asked him about the pressure. At 7-5, this young team has struggled. No matter how low-key Gard treats his situation, the rest of this season will be seen as a three-month proving ground. What if this team misses the NCAA Tournament, as it very well may? What if the interim tag is never removed from his name?
“I’ve never had more than a one-year contract my whole career,” Gard replied. “The focus for me has been on the players. There’s a heartbeat to our program. As long as you keep your focus on the process, not on the outcome, you’ll get where you need to go. I never coach when I look down the road. It’s always about taking care of what’s here right in front of you.”
It was time for Gard to go. In the past day, his whole world had changed. He still had more than 350 texts and 500 emails to get to. He had players and staff to reassure. He has a game against Wisconsin-Green Bay next week.
But right now, the Wisconsin native had an introductory news conference to head to.
So the successor to the throne of Wisconsin’s legendary coach hung up his phone, strode in front of the cameras that were carrying his words live on the Big Ten Network and talked about exactly how big of a move it is to move 18 inches to his left — from the courtside seat of the longtime assistant to the front-and-center seat as the new face of the program.
“The main thing is that you are the final decision-maker,” he said. “The game doesn’t change.”
Follow Reid Forgrave on Twitter @reidforgrave or email him at ReidForgrave@gmail.com.
