Associated Press
Wisconsin bench celebrates as Kentucky's Willie Cauley-Stein walks off after the NCAA Final Four tournament college basketball semifinal game Saturday, April 4, 2015, in Indianapolis. Wisconsin won 71-64. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
After the 2013-14 University of Wisconsin men’s basketball season ended with a devastating one-point loss to Kentucky in the Final Four, senior Zach Bohannon gave Patrick Herb, assistant athletic director of communications for Badgers men’s basketball, a parting gift.
It was a blank, leather-bound journal. On the first page, Bohannon had written this about the Badgers team that would follow his own: “If this team is as special as we think it is, keep notes during the season, because you’re going to want them. Someday, you’ll write a book.”
That inspiration, along with a nudge from Peter Clark, head of KCI Sports Publishing in Stevens Point, led to the recent publication of Make ’Em Believe: The Inside Story of the Badgers’ Road to the 2015 Final Four.
Bohannon’s words echoed the sentiments of everybody on the 2014-15 team as they made their way to the NCAA finals. “Everybody on that team understood it was an all-or-nothing goal,” Herb says.
Yet the Badgers fell short of that goal by five points, losing to Duke 68-63 in the championship game this past spring. Nevertheless, last season’s magical journey is compellingly chronicled in Make ’Em Believe, which is full of Herb’s insider perspective and exclusive photos from his personal collection.
“This team was a very endearing group,” Herb says. “Press conferences became events. There was a purist appeal about the players; they embodied all things that were positive about college sports.”
Herb admits he didn’t keep notes as diligently as he should have, which turned out to be crucial as Clark pushed him for a book — that he wanted on sale by Father’s Day.
That meant Herb had less than two months to write about the most successful basketball season in UW history. He took three weeks off work, set up shop at libraries and coffeehouses, and delivered the book within six weeks.
Shortly following its publication, on June 25, Badger standouts Frank Kaminsky and Sam Dekker were chosen in the first round of the NBA draft. Herb was there, too. “Both of them were as nervous as I’d ever seen them,” Herb says, adding that he also witnessed Kaminsky and Dekker pass each other in a hallway while being shuttled between media interviews and warmly embrace. “It was acknowledgement to each other of what they’d done.”
