The following is excerpted from Patrick Herb's new book "Make 'Em Believe: The inside story of the Badgers' Road to the 2015 Final Four," released last June from KCI Sports Publishing. This hard cover, 160-page keepsake features over 100 color photos and first-hand stories from Wisconsin players and head coach Bo Ryan. Previous excerpts Order your copy of "Make 'Em Believe"
From departure to return, the Badgers' February 24, 2015 trip to Maryland was forgettable.
Winners of 10 straight and owning a record of 13-1 in Big Ten play, the Badgers departed for College Park, Maryland just one win shy of clinching at least a share of the Big Ten championship. Even though Maryland, Michigan State and Purdue all sat a full three games behind in the standings with only four to play, Wisconsin knew it was about to face the most difficult stretch of its season.
UW's back-loaded conference slate featured a four-game finishing stretch that sandwiched a rivalry contest with Michigan State between three challenging road trips. The Badgers would visit the Terps, who were 22-5 and ranked 16th in the country at the time, then travel to Minnesota, where the Badgers had won just once in the last five trips, before wrapping up the regular season at 25th-ranked Ohio State, a team that featured one of the nation's top freshmen in guard D'Angelo Russell.
Wisconsin entered a perfect storm at Maryland's XFINITY Center. In their first season in the Big Ten the No. 14 Terrapins were looking to start new rivalries and school officials pointed to Wisconsin as a perfect challenger. The hosts were also looking to add a signature win to their resume, an opportunity the fifth-ranked Badgers provided.
The capacity crowd and raucous student section was alive from the opening tip, helping Maryland to an 11-point (31-20) halftime lead. The Badgers' first-half struggles included 29.6 percent shooting, and a 1-for-9 showing from 3-point range.
Wisconsin's vaunted front line of
Frank Kaminsky,
Sam Dekker and
Nigel Hayes were a combined 6-for-17 in the first half as UW was held to a season-low 20 first-half points. Too often the Badgers settled for outside shots.
The halftime message was clear: feed the post.
The Badgers responded by scoring 12 of their first 15 points of the second half on the interior, with Kaminsky doing the heavy lifting with eight points in the paint in the opening six-and-a-half minutes.
Facing a second-half deficit for the first time in over six weeks, Ryan's squad foreshadowed a resolve that would become its signature late in the season. The Badgers would claw back to tie the game at 47-47 with 6:36 remaining on a
Bronson Koenig 3-pointer.
"That second half is how we need to play all the time," Kaminsky noted afterward. "We can't wait for the game to come to us, we needed to be aggressive and utilize our strengths right from the start."
Despite the second-half resurgence, on this night, Maryland would not be denied. Dez Wells in particular would not be denied. The senior guard finished with 26 points, including a perfect 7-for-7 effort at the foul line. With the game knotted at 47-all, Wells scored the Terps' next six points to put Maryland in control. UW would trim the lead to three on two occasions in the final minutes but could never get the stop it needed. As the final buzzer sounded on the Terrapins' 59-53 win, the PA announcer's plea to "Please do not rush the court" was no match for a frenzied student section that swallowed up Gary Williams Court in mere seconds.
Any doubts about Maryland fans embracing their new position in the Big Ten were quieted that evening. The loss would signal the end of Wisconsin's 10-game win streak, but Dekker could appreciate a great college basketball environment when he saw it.
"Man, this place is great," he said. "I can't say enough about how great their fans are. It was a pleasure to play here."
Disappointed but undeterred, Wisconsin would return home still just one game shy of a Big Ten championship.
''We were close a couple of times, but we just couldn't do it. It's definitely frustrating,'' UW's leading scorer, Kaminsky (18 points), said after the loss. ''We've had a great season so far. We haven't really been tested like this many times. I think we're going to learn a lot from it.''
Learn from it they did. Wisconsin wouldn't lose again until April.
The Badgers were so close to clinching the championship trophy on their trip to Maryland, they could almost touch it. Literally.
Completely unknown to
Bo Ryan and his team, the Badgers' charter flight from Madison to Baltimore contained a little extra hardware. Among the team's baggage was the 2015 Big Ten championship trophy. An award that up until that point was not UW's property... yet.
Knowing a win over the Terrapins would result in at least a share of the Big Ten title, associate athletic director Justin Doherty was faced with the decision of whether or not to bring the championship trophy for a potential locker room celebration. The decision was simple - yes, in the event of a win, the Badgers would like to be able to recognize their accomplishment in the privacy of the visiting locker room. Knowing that Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany was coincidentally going to be in attendance, a plan for a subdued postgame presentation was put in place.
While the decision was simple, the execution of traveling with a 50-pound box without anyone on the team or staff knowing its contents was a whole lot trickier.
Where David Copperfield might pull off a "now-you-see-it, now-you-don't," Doherty, along with basketball staffers Katherine Vosters and
Marc VandeWettering, executed a "you never saw it."
Internally, the covert plan was nicknamed "Operation Pineapple."
In a box marked "UW Development" the 2015 Big Ten championship trophy was snuck on and off the team charter under the guise of materials needed for entertaining UW donors in the Washington D.C. area. Seeing that the school's development office had never traveled with any materials in the past, explaining the contents of this mysterious box was more difficult.
Vosters and VandeWettering smuggled the trophy into the arena hidden within one of the team's oversized duffle bags.
"If anyone asked, it was a bag full of foam rollers," VandeWettering laughed. "Extremely heavy foam rollers."
Getting the "pineapple" into the arena wasn't the tricky part. Hiding it once it was unwrapped was the tall (heavy) task.
"We had the trophy tucked into the shower of the coaches' locker room," Vosters, UW's director of basketball operations explained. "The toughest part was getting it out of there after the game to a room where no one could see it.
"Weeks earlier, Coach Ryan had specifically said, 'I don't want to know anything about a trophy; when it is or where it is.' So Coach Ryan seeing the trophy, especially after a loss, was not an option. We also certainly didn't want Maryland to know we had it. That wouldn't have been good either."
Vosters and company had unpacked the trophy so it would be available for a celebration as soon as the team returned to the locker room. Given the game was still in doubt in the final minutes, there was no time to conceal the trophy and remove it before Ryan and his staff returned.
Wisconsin would go on to lose the game and as Ryan and his staff huddled in the coaches' locker room, Vosters couldn't help but keep a nervous eye on the concealing shower.
"After Coach exited the locker room to talk to the team, we started scrambling," Vosters added. "We had no idea how long we'd have until he returned so we had to get it out of there and to a different private location to repack it. The box was too heavy and big for one person to carry so we ended up sliding it down the hallway and into a family bathroom in another part of arena where we could repack it and tape it shut. The whole thing was ridiculous."
Unfortunately for Vosters and the Badgers, that wouldn't even be the most ridiculous part of the road trip.
Following the game in College Park, Ryan was in a hurry to catch the team's charter flight home. He even explained that in the postgame press conference as Mark Turgeon graciously allowed Ryan to address the media after the Maryland coach had already begun his remarks.
This was probably one flight Ryan and his team wished they had missed.
Still sour from the loss, the Badgers boarded the aircraft just after 11 p.m. (ET) and settled in for a two-hour flight home to Madison. What is usually a hasty boarding and takeoff, this departure would not be as swift. First, the flight crew was unable to properly close the cabin door.
Ninety minutes later Vosters was scrambling for a Plan B.
"By this point, I was assuming we weren't going to get out," Vosters explained. "We had no bus - it was already 40 minutes away - or hotel or backup plane. We had started holding rooms at a bunch of hotels around the Baltimore airport area when a mechanic showed up. He eventually got the door secured with some magic spray or something. In fact, I remember Coach Ryan saying to me, 'Kat, make sure we pack that spray on our next trip.' I think he was joking, but I wasn't sure," Vosters laughed.
Perhaps the door not closing should have been an omen.
Now after midnight and about 45 minutes into the quiet redeye, a whispered rumor began to spread throughout the sleepy cabin.
"One of the plane's engines is not functioning properly and we will be making an emergency landing in Pittsburgh."
Instant perspective.
Many of the 41-person travel party were tipped off that something was amiss when the plane began to descend far too early, and rapidly, into the anticipated two-hour flight.
With the pilot later describing the cockpit as "too hectic to make an announcement" the team was left with a flight attendant as the intermediary. Showing no signs of panic or urgency, the flight attendant remained professional and calm.
"We're not trying to scare you," she would explain.
Too late.
"The captain doesn't like the way one of the engines is performing, so we want to get this airplane on the ground as soon as possible."
For those still awake, thoughts of Wisconsin's slow start against Maryland and second-half comeback for naught began to disappear. Ten minutes after being notified of the issue, the team's Embraer ERJ-145 was landing on a runway filled with ambulances, fire trucks and emergency personnel. Unsettling.
Once everyone was assured that there was no imminent danger, a difficult question surfaced.
What do you do with a 41-person travel party at 1 a.m. in Pittsburgh when you have no hotel, transportation or plan for the next day?
Quite a challenge for Vosters, who was in her first year coordinating Wisconsin's logistics.
"When we were delayed getting out because of the door, I remember somebody remarking that this is an operations worst nightmare," Vosters said. "They were wrong. Landing in a new city at 1 a.m. with absolutely nothing planned... that is a worst nightmare."
Within a minute of landing, Vosters' makeshift operations team (with program assistant
Marc VandeWettering and me) was working its way down a list of a dozen hotels near Pittsburgh International Airport. Most of the hotels had no vacancies due to bad weather in the area cancelling a number of flights, but Vosters was able to book a total of 24 rooms spread across three hotels.
Despite the predicament, Ryan played the role of comic relief.
"I picked a bad day to stop sniffing glue," Ryan deadpanned a line from the famous movie Airplane.
By the time the team stuffed into seven different utility vans and settled into the respective hotels, the clock was past 2 a.m.
"We probably shouldn't even say this, but we had people riding on top of luggage, in the backs of trucks, on each other's laps. By that point, everybody was just like, 'Get me to bed,'" said Vosters.
Surely the next day had to go smoother.
Not so fast. Just as Vosters believed she had secured a new charter plane and bus to pick everyone up, that plane was delayed in South Carolina and the bus broke down outside one of the hotels.
Of course it did.
"It might sound strange, but one of my favorite off-court memories from the season is actually when our plane had to make the emergency landing on the Maryland trip," Dekker recalled of the team hanging out in the impromptu hotel and organizing paper football tournaments. "We were all salty after the loss and that unexpected detour and hassle of staying overnight in Pittsburgh helped us get over the loss. You had to make light of the ridiculous situation, and that extra time hanging with each other was valuable."
The Badgers would finally land safely in Madison a little before 2 p.m. (CT) the next day. A date with Michigan State and the Big Ten championship trophy was just four days away.
