They’ll Badger You With Defense

A daughter can learn a lot from her father, but how often do life’s lessons include the principles of man-to-man defense?

Kathi Bennett is daddy’s little girl, down to the whistle and the clipboard, so it was with unabashed joy that she watched her father’s weekend vindication.

Dick Bennett, Wisconsin’s fifth-year coach, has led the Badgers to the Sweet 16 with a set-shot, bounce-pass, pasty-faced starting lineup that could have served as technical advisors for the basketball scenes in “Flubber.”

Defense may win championships, but rarely does it win acclaim.

Wisconsin’s two-game NCAA sweep of Fresno State and Arizona proved that basketball can be more than highlight-snippet fodder for ESPN’s “SportsCenter.”

The Badgers held Jerry Tarkanian’s Bulldogs 27 points below their season average and had No. 1 Arizona stuck on 44 points with 2:08 left.

Wisconsin was laughed out of last year’s NCAA tournament after scoring 32 points in a first-round loss.

No one’s laughing now.

“He has a vision of how the game should be played, and it’s coming true,” Kathi says of her dad. “It’s happening. His vision of what quality basketball is all about has not wavered. He’s been strong. I know he’s had criticism and he’s stood up to that. It’s so neat to see it happen because it can be done the right way.”

Kathi Bennett doesn’t merely parrot her dad’s philosophy.

She employs it.

Kathi Bennett is the women’s basketball coach at Evansville University in Indiana--a chip off the old low-post block.

Dick and Kathi are the only father-daughter coaching team in Division I, and the Bennetts are quite a coaching family. Dick’s younger brother Jack led Division III Wisconsin Stevens Point to a 25-5 record this season.

Kathi’s Evansville squad finished with a school-record 23 victories.

It took nerve for Kathi to enter the family business, even more to implement the conservative cloth-coat system that can’t be appreciated in 30-second sound bites.

Then again, what defense was Kathi going to run?

“We try, we’re not as good, not even close,” Kathi says by phone from her office in Evansville. “We certainly try to do those things. I don’t know if anybody can quite get it how Dad’s got it.

“Our half-court defense, we try to keep teams out of the paint, and contest everything. We don’t switch on screens. We try to fight everything.”

Dick Bennett came logically to his philosophy. He has coached for 35 years in Wisconsin at the high school and college level.

“Wisconsin is not mecca for recruits to come,” he says. “But it’s always produced well-coached kids, tough-minded kids.”

Through the years, Bennett kept preaching and plugging. He went 173-80 in his seven-season stint at Stevens Point and 187-109 in a 10-year reign at Wisconsin Green Bay. His 1993-94 Green Bay team pulled off a first-round NCAA shocker, beating a California team that featured Jason Kidd and Lamond Murray.

Bennett is already among the most successful coaches in Wisconsin history, having led his team to three NCAA tournaments in five years.

He is also a guru among coaches. In a 1998 Sports Illustrated survey of 115 coaches, the question was posed: “If you could go to one coaching clinic, whose would it be?”

Bennett finished tied for third with Indiana’s Bob Knight, trailing only Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski and Utah’s Rick Majerus.

Yet, Bennett’s by-the-book, methodical style has at times chased spectators from their seats.

When Wisconsin started 1-4 in Big Ten play and 11-10 overall, it was Bennett’s seat that was burning.

“We’re used to hearing about ugly wins,” Bennett says. “But if you lose ugly, it’s much worse. But I think that pulled people together. I think we had a siege mentality, a circle-the-wagons in that stretch.”

Wisconsin has won seven of its last eight games since a Feb. 19 loss to Michigan State.

None of what Bennett espouses works without willingness from his players. You could argue that not one Badger--six are home-grown players--would start for any of the 15 other schools remaining in the NCAA tournament.

Not a single Wisconsin player made the Big Ten’s first, second or third teams.

It is a faceless, selfless squad.

“We’ve stood by him,” point guard Mike Kelley says of his coach. “He’s taken some shots for his system, but we’ve always defended him. We think it’s the best thing we can do.”

Players first arriving at the Madison campus may not know there are rims on the baskets.

“Defense is what he puts first, from the day you get on campus,” Kelley says. “I don’t think it’s that way on every campus.”

To succeed, the Badgers (20-13) have to play in almost perfect harmony. Their defensive pressure fuels an offense that has been hit-and-miss until a recent, bizarre spurt of consistency.

After his tournament wins, Bennett appeared almost stunned at his team’s efficiency.

“I’m not sure I can adequately describe how good I feel and how proud,” he said after the Fresno State win.

Bennett said his team’s precision in defeating top-seeded Arizona is “something I’ll remember a long, long, time.”

Kathi Bennett was always proud being Dick’s daughter, but maybe even more so this week.

“‘My whole life, all I remember is being in a gym, hanging out after games, waiting for him to be done,” she says. “Just being able to be in a gym the entire time . . . How exciting! How wonderful! Because it’s in my blood too. What a wonderful life, to witness all the triumphs and also the disappointments. To see it all, and to share that, it’s something special.”

Kathi remembers as a child begging her dad to let her help him run a basketball camp for girls.

Dad told her she wasn’t ready.

“He said, ‘You haven’t proven yourself. You have to know certain things to do it,’ ” Kathi says. “That probably instilled more in me than anything that, no matter who he was teaching, he was going to do it right.”

Kathi would come to understand her dad’s commandments.

“You’ve got to play with passion,” she says. “Defense is heart. He’s talked so much about having a servant’s mentality. He says you have to make the whole a heck of a lot better than the sum of its parts. That’s what he does. Those kids serve one another playing defense.”

The philosophy has served Kathi well. Before going to Evansville four years ago, she went 155-32 in seven seasons at Wisconsin Oshkosh, leading her 1995-96 team to a 31-0 record and the Division III national title.

Monday, Kathi was scrambling to make arrangements to see her dad’s team play Louisiana State in Thursday’s West Regional semifinal game at Albuquerque.

Once again, Wisconsin doesn’t stand a chance--on paper. There may not be a more athletic team left in the tournament than LSU.

“I believe my dad’s team has the ability to beat anyone on a given night,” Kathi says, “but they also have the ability to lose to anyone on a given night. That’s what makes them so intriguing.”

LOOSE ENDS

* The fallout: The NCAA didn’t make a mistake in seeding Arizona and Stanford as No. 1 teams--there were few viable alternatives--but clearly both teams were vulnerable.

Arizona was already thin before losing Loren Woods because of a back injury, and the last thing it could afford was forward Richard Jefferson getting in foul trouble against Wisconsin.

Stanford stumbled down the stretch, but seemed the logical No. 1 choice in the South over Temple, which didn’t last beyond the second round.

* The most incredible stat line of the tournament so far belongs to Indiana guard A.J. Guyton, a first-team All-American who missed his only two shots in the Hoosiers’ 20-point loss to Pepperdine. If Knight has forgotten more about basketball than all of us combined are ever going to know, how does Guyton get only two shots?

The Hoosiers are 21-22 after Feb. 1 the last four seasons and have lost their last four NCAA games by an average of 18 points.

* Remember the excitement about the state of Indiana getting six schools into the field? Only Purdue has won a game. Ball State, Indiana, Valparaiso, Butler and Indiana State were first-round losers.

* Conference USA, the Atlantic 10 and Mountain West have no schools left in the field. Cincinnati was ousted in the second round for the fourth consecutive year, but the news isn’t all bad. Three Bearcat players--Ryan Fletcher, Jermaine Tate and Kenyon Martin--are on track to graduate.

* A good omen? Seton Hall is the first team since Louisville in 1980 to win consecutive overtime games in the tournament. Louisville won the national title that year.

* What kind of heat does a short tournament run put on the Kentucky coach? Tubby Smith is denying reports that he may consider leaving to coach at Georgia Tech. But when asked by the Lexington Herald-Leader if he planned to be back next year, Smith said, “Oh, yeah.”

* For what it’s worth, Utah Coach Rick Majerus says he picked Michigan State in his NCAA pool before his Utes lost to the Spartans last weekend.

* Stat freaks, take note. Florida, which faces No. 1 Duke in the East Regional semifinals, is 0-7 against top-ranked teams.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Badger Defense

A look at Wisconsin’s team defense since Dick Bennett became coach (BT=Big Ten):

FIELD GOAL PERCENTAGE

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Year FG% BT NCAA 1995-96 .430 9th -- 1996-97 .378 1st 4th 1997-98 .425 5th -- 1998-99 .408 5th -- 1999-00 .400 4th --

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SCORING DEFENSE

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Year PPG BT NCAA 1995-96 64.8 4th -- 1996-97 55.3 1st 4th 1997-98 62.6 1st 19th 1998-99 55.2 1st 2nd 1999-00 56.0 1st 4th

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