BY MIKE LUCAS
UWBadgers.com Senior Writer
MADISON, Wis. — On what would have been Selection Sunday for the NCAA basketball tournament — a casualty of the mass cancelations brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic — Wisconsin coach Greg Gard and his oldest daughter Mackenzie, a college freshman, went pheasant hunting.
"Some rare father-daughter time," said Gard, who was joined by his brother and a nephew at a hunt club just outside of Evansville, Wisconsin. "Obviously, you already knew that Sunday (and the bracket reveal) was not going to happen for three or four days, so it wasn't like it came out of the blue."
Gard met with his team last Thursday after the Big Ten Tournament was canceled. The following day, he shared information with everybody following the NCAA's cancellation of its March Madness event. Last Friday, most of his players left the UW campus on the eve of spring break.
There will be no face-to-face instruction when classes resume on March 23.
"I shared some of the campus directives that we got on social distancing and about not congregating at the Kohl Center," Gard said. "And I highly encouraged them to just go home — and not go on spring break — and I think most of them have adhered to that to my knowledge."
There's no script for what happens next. Gard was on a conference call Monday to discuss the status and options for his Garding Against Cancer fundraiser scheduled for May 2 at the Kohl Center. Uncertainty also abounds with the Badger basketball youth and high school camps in June.
"Right now, we don't know how it's going to unfold over the next four to six to eight weeks," he said. "What's it going to look like when we get to the end of April? What's it going to look like when we get to the end of May? No one knows where the finish line is in all of this.
"There's no facet of society that has not been impacted.
"It's really day-by-day and you have to adjust to all of the changes."
Gard has basically cleaned his plate of basketball.
"I've intentionally tried to stay off the Big Ten Network and off ESPN," he said. "I've just tried to keep my mind off it. I'm a little bit into decompression mode. With all the stuff going on with our own kids and school being canceled, we've tried to zero in on them."
Team Gard includes Michelle and Greg and their children: Mackenzie, Isaac and Peyton.
"All three are at home. That's going to be the case for the foreseeable future and it has been good," Gard said. "This is a benefit for the horrible situation going on in the world. We get to spend more time with the kids. I've tried to look at this as the glass is half full.
"Here's time we have together we normally wouldn't have (in March). We're normally running around like chickens with our heads cut off at this time of the year. We're looking at every single piece of tape that we can find on that week's opponent in the tournament."
While confessing "I'm trying not to drive my wife crazy," he added, "This is a timeout to really step back and spend time with the people who are really close to you and important."
At the end of each season, Gard routinely takes some time to decompress.
"I've always tried to take a timeout, so to speak, to get some normalcy before I'd jump back into reviewing the year in-depth," he said. "I will do that sooner than normal, I think. We are landlocked as far as recruiting. We can't go anywhere. We can't have kids on campus for at least the next month.
"And that could get extended as well. There's no end in sight."
Gard acknowledged that the spring workouts for his returning players are in jeopardy and there are no team activities until at least April 6. Only grad student Brevin Pritzl had senior eligibility on the roster though walk-on Michael Ballard, a redshirt junior, is graduating and moving on.
As it was, the Badgers ended the regular season with a full-out sprint to the finish line by winning eight straight games and a share of the Big Ten championship with Michigan State and Maryland. They also earned the No. 1 seed going into the conference tournament.
Forty-eight hours after celebrating the title on March 7 in the visitor's locker room at Assembly Hall in Bloomington, Indiana — on the heels of a come-from-behind win over the Hoosiers — Gard shared the spoils, the championship trophy with UW assistant Howard Moore, who's on medical leave.
Joining Gard in the vist to Moore were assistants Joe Krabbenhoft, Dean Oliver, Alando Tucker and trainer Henry Perez-Guerra. Besides the trophy, they also brought Moore an official 2020 Big Ten title hat and t-shirt, the same ones that the players were wearing after the Indiana win.
"It has been an emotional 10 months and there are constant reminders of what happened, and it never really leaves your mind," Gard said of the Memorial Day weekend car accident that claimed Moore's wife Jennifer and daughter Jaidyn last May.
"I was able to take the whole staff to visit Howard. As emotional as it was — and it affected all of us — I felt it was important, it was right, it was special. It doesn't erase what has happened and the results of that terrible accident. But we will take any small step of healing that we can find."
Few groups have been better equipped to handle setbacks than this one. The players and coaches have been gifted with an uncommon resiliency when confronted by adversity. It has continued to serve them well in the face of an ever-changing world brought on by a global pandemic.
"Our guys have a really good understanding of how the real world can be cruel and unforgiving at times," Gard said. "When this call came down (the post-season cancellations), they were disappointed. But they can take great pride with how we finished and what happened at the end of the season."
Moreover, speaking to today's reality, he said, "This is bigger than sports, this is bigger than basketball, the Big Ten and NCAA. And they understand how the real-world works. They got a cold, hard dose of that last May. I know they all wanted to play in it (the tournaments).
"But if they take a step back — as we did several times during the year — they realize the events of Memorial Day weekend gave us an anchor to what's really important and what matters in life. Coach Tucker said it best last week when we found out that the tournament was off.
"He said, 'We've got a pandemic — we've got first-world problems — and the cancellation of a basketball tournament is a long way down the list of importance in our world right now.'"
Meanwhile, Michelle Gard has been coordinating in-home activities for the family.
"She's putting her principal hat back on and organizing everybody's day," Greg said. "We have exercise time and reading time where all five of us are going into our own space with a book to read.
"I've got plenty of books to last however long this lasts."
A Vince Lombardi book on leadership is at the top of his list.
"I started it and I got about 10 pages in — highlighting a bunch of stuff — before I put it down," he said. "I dug it out, blew the dust off and I've got it sitting on my nightstand. That's going to be No. 1."
