Bob Campbell/UW Athletics
Greg Gard coaches former Badger Frank Kaminsky in a 2015 Big Ten Tournament game against Michigan.
If Greg Gard’s name didn’t ring a bell before Dec. 14, it probably does now.
The 45-year-old, who loyally stood by the side of now former University of Wisconsin men’s basketball coach Bo Ryan for 23 years as his longtime (and eventually top) assistant, is the Badgers’ new interim head coach.
Other opportunities have come and gone while Gard followed Ryan around the southern part of the state, first as one of his assistants at UW-Platteville from 1993 to 1999, then spending two years with Ryan at UW-Milwaukee and finally following him to Madison in 2001. He rode the bench for the past 14 years, even when head coaching opportunities at other universities bounced his way.
“I certainly contemplated them many times. But it always felt like it was the right thing to stay. Some of it has been personal and some of it has been professional in terms of why I’ve chosen to do what I’ve done,” Gard tells Isthmus days before Ryan’s surprise Dec. 15 announcement that he would retire, effective immediately.
“Greg’s ready,” Ryan declared in his late-night press conference following the Badgers’ 64-49 win over Texas A&M-Corpus Christi. “And I feel really good about that. I told the team that there are people who have received head coaching jobs who were assistants at places without anywhere near the record that he has — not even close. There’s nobody more prepared than him.”
In Gard’s 14 seasons with Ryan’s Badgers, UW has never finished lower than fourth in the Big Ten, posting a mark of 172-68 in conference play. He also won three Division III national titles with Ryan at UW-Platteville, while the pair established an impressive 161-13 record.
“I am excited for coach Gard,” says Ben Brust, who played for the Badgers between 2010 and 2014, spent some time in a European league and now lives in Illinois. “He’s had plenty of opportunities to lead a team, but he grinded it out at Wisconsin, and he’s ready to take over the program.”
When Dick Bennett retired three games into the 2000-01 season after reaching the Final Four earlier in the year, Brad Soderberg, Bennett’s top assistant, took over as interim head coach and led the Badgers to a 16-10 season. But Pat Richter, then Wisconsin’s athletic director, opted to hire Ryan instead.
Although he’s been part of one of the most consistent and stable programs in all of Division I basketball for the past 15 years and understands what it takes to excel at Wisconsin academically, socially and on the court, Gard has no previous head coaching experience — a fact some observers say could doom his future with the Badgers, especially considering athletic director Barry Alvarez has shown a preference for hiring experienced head coaches.
“My track record speaks for itself,” says Gard, recently heralded the fourth-best “X’s & O’s” assistant coach in college basketball by coachstat.net, based on votes from a panel of national college basketball media, scouts and coaches. “My beliefs and philosophies are very well entrenched. I know what I view as successful basketball.”
By all accounts, players seem to like Gard and consider him an effective communicator with a broad understanding of the game and a knack for scouting. He shares with Ryan similar basketball philosophies if not on-court mannerisms.
“As I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, I pretty quickly figured out that coaching was going to be something that I had to be a part of — someway, somehow — without ever envisioning it going this far,” says Gard, who is married with three kids between the ages of 7 and 14. “I was going to school in Platteville, and I took a job as a junior high coach. It just kind of grew from there.”
Gard’s history with Ryan can be traced back to the mid-1980s, when the future Iowa-Grant High School basketball player — he was on the Panthers’ 1989 team that went 26-1 but lost by two points in the state semifinals — attended the Steve Yoder summer basketball camp in Madison. Ryan was a camp assistant at the time.
While in college, Gard also coached at Platteville High School and Hazel Green’s Southwestern High School, working summers as a counselor at Ryan’s camps in Platteville. “One summer, he came to me and said, ‘Hey, enough of the high school stuff. You need to be with me full-time,’” Gard says.
The rest is history.
A new era in Badger basketball begins Wednesday, Dec. 23, with Wisconsin’s final nonconference game against UW-Green Bay at the Kohl Center. Bringing in a 7-5 record, the young team that lost four seniors and one junior from last year’s Final Four squad is struggling this season, with one- or two-point home losses to UW-Milwaukee, Marquette and Western Illinois.
Gard and his Badgers jump right into the Big Ten schedule on Dec. 29 for another home game against Purdue.
“The route I took is a very uncommon route,” says Gard, who graduated from UW-Platteville in 1995 with a degree in physical education and health, and earned a master’s degree in counselor education from the university in 2007. “To be able to work my way from junior high to freshmen to high school to an unpaid volunteer at Division III to a lightly paid coach in Division III to a full-time assistant in Division III and then on to Division I — and do it all in my state — is what makes this so unique and so unfathomable. I look at peers across the country and see how nomadic they need to be. I was in the right place at the right time.”
When Ryan announced in June his intent to retire at the end of the 2015-16 season, it again looked as if Gard was in the right place at the right time. Taking over a major Division I program had been a longtime goal. Then, in August, Ryan reneged and said he wasn’t sure about retiring.
During his official retirement announcement last week, Ryan cited the illness of Gard’s father, Glen, who was suffering from an aggressive form of brain cancer known as glioblastoma multiforme earlier this year.
“Everybody knows, it’s no secret, that every head coach would like their top assistant to be the coach,” Ryan said. “There was no way, in June, while coach Gard was flying around the country to the best cancer people...in the world and trying to figure out how he could do something to help his dad. So, therefore, we put [retirement] on the backburner.”
Glen Gard was diagnosed with cancer in May and passed away in late October.
“The more we learned, the more we knew it was going to be like combining Michigan State, Kentucky and Duke all into one. It was a big-time opponent that was going to be extremely difficult to beat,” Gard says, explaining that there is no cure for that type of cancer, only treatment. “You think, as a coach, you’re invincible: ‘Someway, somehow, I can figure out a way to beat Michigan State or Kentucky.’ But I just couldn’t find a way. I don’t think there will ever be anything in coaching that will create more adversity than what I watched over those last six months.”
That said, Gard now faces a challenge of a different sort — proving he deserves to have the “interim” dropped from his new job title.
