Bo Ryan holds court

The Badgers basketball coach talks family, fans and the Final Four

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Astute observers of the University of Wisconsin men's basketball team might remember a handful of games when coach Bo Ryan wore a red sport coat. One of those times, his mother, Louise, happened to be watching on TV.

"After that game, my mom told me, 'I wouldn't wear that again. It makes you look like you're parking cars,'" says Ryan.

When was the last time you saw Bo Ryan in a red sport coat?

The man loved his parents, and he still loves to tell stories about them: Like the time Louise found out that kindergarten classes in Chester, Pa. -- a quaint river town located between Philadelphia and Wilmington, Del. -- were only a half-day long; she wanted Bo out of the house all day, so she made the 4-year-old skip kindergarten and advance straight to first grade.

Then there was the time Bo dropped 40 points in a Chester Biddy Basketball League championship game against a team coached by his father, William "Butch" Ryan Sr.; Butch didn't speak to his son for three days.

And the time a television camera zoomed in on Ryan during the heat of the moment, allowing fans watching at home, including Louise again, to read his lips. "We didn't raise you to talk like that," she later scolded him, although Ryan chuckles when telling that story.

The coach's mom and dad passed away within eight months of each other -- Louise in December 2012 and Butch in August 2013. And, as anyone who paid even casual attention to the Badgers' Final Four run in March now knows, Bo and Butch attended every Final Four together since 1976, when one Big Ten powerhouse (Indiana) crushed another (Michigan) for the national championship at the Spectrum in Philadelphia.

"It was our convention," the man born William Francis Ryan Jr. says about those annual reunions with his father. "He'd meet me at the Final Four."

Did the media milk the irony of Ryan's Wisconsin Badgers reaching the 2014 Final Four just months after Butch's death? Sure, because it made for one hell of a story.

Remember those photos of the coach standing on a ladder, proudly clutching the net he'd just cut down following the Badgers' 64-63 overtime thriller against top-seeded Arizona to advance to the Final Four? Remember his red-eyed, choked-up interview with TV reporter Craig Sager minutes after that game? The one in which Ryan pointed heavenward and was barely able to proclaim, "This is for Butch"?

That day, March 29, 2014, would have been Butch Ryan's 90th birthday.

Ryan's hope

If you don't think Ryan and the basketball Badgers are Wisconsin's best sports story of 2014, recalibrate your cynicism.

"My dad knew that sometime it would happen. He told me at one of our Final Fours, 'You'll coach in this thing,'" says Ryan, who arrived in Madison in 2001 after winning four Division III national titles at University of Wisconsin-Platteville between 1984 and 1999 and resurrecting the basketball program at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee during two productive seasons at the turn of the millennium.

Since he took over the UW men's team from interim head coach Brad Soderberg (who stepped in after Dick Bennett retired during the 2000-01 season), Ryan has led the Badgers to 13 straight NCAA tournament appearances. They include six Sweet 16s, two Elite Eights and last season's Final Four in Arlington, Texas, which ended with a disappointing 74-73 loss to Kentucky in the semifinals.

Seven months later, more than 8,000 fans showed up at the Kohl Center on Oct. 26 to watch the annual Red/White Scrimmage. Even Ryan didn't expect a crowd of that size, telling reporters that the line outside the arena doors had never been longer to watch a meaningless intrasquad scrimmage.

And last week, the 2013 Big Ten Coach of the Year tipped off his 14th season at Wisconsin with a resounding 62-31 win over Northern Kentucky. That was followed by another one Sunday, 89-45 over Chattanooga. Easy opponents, sure, but it was a convincing way to start a highly-anticipated season, nonetheless.

The Badgers, led by a sturdy roster of sophomores and seniors, entered the season ranked number three (behind Kentucky and Arizona) by the Associated Press. Frank Kaminsky and Sam Dekker (who has recovered from a preseason leg injury) are included in conversations about the Big Ten's best players, and most sports media types have all but handed the Big Ten trophy to Ryan.

The coach also recently landed at number seven on ESPN.com's list of the top 50 college basketball coaches in the country, ahead of Syracuse's Jim Boeheim (number 12) and Virginia Commonwealth's Shaka Smart (13) and just behind Duke's Mike Krzyzewski (four) and Michigan State's Tom Izzo (three). (For what it's worth: John Calipari, whose Kentucky Wildcats fell to Connecticut in the National Championship Game after beating the Badgers last season, came in at number one.)

ESPN's Eamonn Brennan called Ryan an "underrated pillar of the sport," writing that "[e]veryone has always kind of known Ryan was a great coach and a man fully comfortable with his homegrown success. But the consistency, the grind, the lack of deep tournament exposure, occasionally made people take his work for granted. It would have been impossible to see him this high on this list two or three years ago."

Even with all of the extra attention Ryan has generated during the offseason -- more local speaking engagements and charitable appearances, increased national media coverage and greater universal recognition -- the coach hasn't lost his keen sense of perspective.

"It's not as if all of a sudden people know I'm a coach," he says. "Our players have been so consistent for so long. I've got smart guys who understand what this is all about. When they're with me in practice, they're not thinking about last year. Yeah, we won extra games in the NCAA Tournament and advanced a little further, but every experience we have prepares us for what's next."

Stellar resume

Ryan is quick -- maybe too quick for some Badger fans -- to compare his experiences last season with those from his glory years at Platteville in the 1990s.

"Those national championships at Platteville meant as much as, if not more than, getting to the Final Four," he says. "The only difference is the number of media people covering them."

But let Ryan explain further: He says when he won that first NCAA Division III title in 1991, his happiest moment came not in the thrill of victory or during the trophy presentation. It happened when he looked over at the student and parent sections and soaked everything in.

He did the same thing in March after the win over Arizona. "The enthusiasm and joy of watching the players and fans go through that experience made me happy," he says. "The Final Four is like nothing else in college sports. The attention often goes to the coach, but it should go to the players."

Ryan has hit multiple milestones during his 30-year collegiate head coaching career. He's won the most games in UW men's basketball history (321 and counting entering the 2014-15 season, including a 195-21 record at the Kohl Center), and he is one of only five active Division I coaches to reach the hallowed 700-win mark, which came against Minnesota in last season's Big Ten Tournament.

In hindsight, it's no surprise Ryan wound up a successful basketball coach. After all, Butch Ryan coached basketball, baseball and football and was Bo's greatest influence. "Your parents are your first teachers," he says.

Ryan played all three sports as a kid, and became a star guard on the basketball team at Wilkes College in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. After college, armed with a business degree, he took a job at the oil company ARCO. "Then I got drafted, and not by the NBA," he says.

After his stint as a military police officer in the U.S. Army in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ryan began his coaching career in 1972 at Brookhaven Junior High School in Delaware County, Pa., where he also taught history (an occupation he would have throughout his coaching career, until landing in Madison in 2001.)

He went to Dominican College of Racine, in Wisconsin, in 1973 as an assistant and bounced back to the Philadelphia area in 1974 to take a head coaching job at Sun Valley High School. Ryan also married his wife, Kelly, that year. The couple would go on to have five children -- three daughters and two sons.

Before too long, Ryan headed back west with Kelly to join the University of Wisconsin staff for the first time, as an assistant from 1976 to 1984. Ryan was hired by Bill Cofield, who he had worked with at Dominican College of Racine (and who, at Wisconsin, became the Big Ten's first African American head coach); while at Wisconsin, Ryan later coached under Steve Yoder.

Ryan took over the reins at UW-Platteville in 1984, where he proceeded to turn the Pioneers into a powerhouse, compiling a 353-76 record over 15 years. The Pioneers won more games than any other NCAA men's basketball team in any division during the 1990s, and in 2007, UW-Platteville named the Williams Fieldhouse basketball floor "Bo Ryan Court."

Between 1999 and 2001, Ryan was the head coach at UW-Milwaukee, leading the Panthers to their first back-to-back winning seasons in eight years. Then Bucky came calling again, and Bo Ryan has coached the Wisconsin Badgers ever since.

Ryan quietly established himself as one of the best in the business, patrolling the sidelines with hawk-like intensity that belies his charming and generous off-court demeanor. He's not a yeller, nor is he prone to temper tantrums. He doesn't need to be, according to Ted Cottrell, one of Ryan's football teammates at Chester High School and a longtime defensive coordinator for multiple NFL teams.

"Tough isn't jumping up and down shouting or getting in people's faces," Cottrell told ESPN.com. "He can demonstrate it without being vocal all the time. He gives you that look. You ever see his look? He's got one of those stares."

Clean and bright

Those years teaching history have served Ryan well, as he's been able to emphasize the "student" in his student-athletes.

Since taking over at Wisconsin, Ryan's teams have routinely posted cumulative grade point averages between 2.9 and 3.1, and they trail only Purdue and Northwestern in the number of Academic All-Big Ten honors.

With a reputation for running a clean program with players who, for the most part, manage to stay out of high-profile trouble, Ryan says his secret is really no secret at all: It's about putting trust in his players and giving them the power to lead.

"You just gotta have those voices in the locker room, those leaders on the team who believe in doing things right and pass that down to their peers," he says. "When your peers say, 'This is what we need to do,' that goes a long way."

This year's Badgers squad includes many such leaders. Although Ryan won't name names, he refers to the team's "four seniors" (guards Traevon Jackson and Josh Gasser and forwards Duje Dukan and Frank Kaminsky) as players "who keep doing what I was just talking about."

Younger players, such as sophomores Vitto Brown, Nigel Hayes and Bronson Koenig take cues from those guys, the coach says, which bodes well for the future. The team lost graduating seniors Ben Brust and Zach Bohannon -- two players who made significant contributions to the Badgers' success -- and the team will be younger still next season. (For a preview of the 2014-15 Badgers, see sidebar.)

Even Ryan, at age 66, is younger than fellow coaches Boeheim and Krzyzewski. And North Carolina's Roy Williams, Texas Tech's Tubby Smith, West Virginia's Bob Huggins and Louisville's Rick Pitino aren't far behind him.

"I've said in the past that Wisconsin will be the last place I coach," Ryan says, refusing to speculate on the "R" word. "I'll tell you what I tell everybody who asks me how much longer I'll coach: After you ask a 40-year-old coach how many years he's going to coach, I'll answer that question."

For now, Bo Ryan enjoys running what has become one of the most talked-about college basketball programs in the country, and retirement isn't an issue. He's still going strong.

"I don't feel any different now than I did last year," he says. "Or," he adds, "ten years ago."