TAYLOR WURTZ
Lud Wurtz opted to put a stop to their one-on-one games when Taylor was a junior in high school and it dawned on him that "she could get to the basket on me'' with relative ease and regularity.
"I credit all my success to him,'' said Taylor
Wurtz, the fifth-leading rebounder (7.4) and seventh-leading scorer (16.2) in the Big Ten. She's also averaging the second-most 3-poiners (2.5) in the league. "We didn't have a gym to play in, so we'd be shoveling the snow (off the driveway) and al- ways shooting outside, and he'd be rebounding for me. Just watching him, he had a love for the sport.''
Lud Wurtz, who once scored 44 points against
River Falls, still holds Ripon's single-season scoring record. After graduation in 1978, he en- tertained playing in Europe. But after earning an NCAA postgraduate scholarship, he attended law school in Madison. Wurtz has been practicing law for three decades — branching off on his own in 1997. Wurtz Law LLC specializes in family law in Ri-
pon. At an early age, Lud Wurtz taught his daugh- ter "to always respect the game, to work hard at her God-given talents and to play the game as hard as you humanly can until the final whistle blows.''
It didn't take long to see her potential in the sport, either. "I can go back to the second grade when she
started playing,'' Lud Wurtz said. "I saw her backpedaling and she was going backwards as far as she was going forwards. The athletic gift was in her.
"And her drive was just unbelievable. She
would go out in snow storms and shoot. Or she would go out in 95 degree heat and work on the Pete Maravich basketball moves.''
44 » VARSITY FEBRUARY 16, 2012
Ah, yes, Pistol Pete, the late but great Pete Maravich; a legendary college basketball sharp- shooter and Hall of Famer who fashioned a 44-point career average at LSU before the 3-point shot. Lud Wurtz introduced Maravich to Taylor
Wurtz. While growing up in Mayville, he used to shovel the snow off the driveway, too, and shoot
