TWO-SPORT SUCCESS I
s Wisconsin a football school? Is Wisconsin a bas- ketball school?
Bret Bielema says Wisconsin is both, and nei-
ther. "We're a Wisconsin school,'' Bielema stressed. Football and basketball are not mutually exclu-
sive. "I've gotten hit with this question a lot of times,'' said Bielema, who's going into his seventh year as the UW football coach. "I remember a new coach coming to Iowa and proclaiming that he was going to make it a basketball school, not a football school. I was kind of like, 'What in the world?' "When you look at Wisconsin — whether it's football or basketball or men's and women's hockey or our rowing teams or what Mick (Byrne) has done in cross country by winning a national championship — we're a school that promotes everyone's program, which makes us all better.''
That would fall in line with UW associate head basketball coach Greg Gard's perspective. "Any time the school in general is in the headlines in a positive way, it's always beneficial,'' he said. But is there a correlation between football and basketball on the Madison campus? "The number one thing for us at Wisconsin is exposure,'' Bielema said, "and the more expo- sure the football program gets, the better off we are and that can be tied in with basketball. When Bo (Ryan) and his teams have success, a lot of times they end up talking about us on those TV games.
"The brands that we play are similar. We're both locked into unique systems. I don't know anything about basketball. I don't even pretend to know what's going on. I do know from hearing
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people talk that Bo has a certain system that he gets players to fit into, and he has success year after year.''
Although the bases of operations are in dif-
ferent venues — Camp Randall Stadium and the Kohl Center — there's a compatibility between the players and the coaches that transcend their differences. "Any time we've asked them for help, they've definitely done it,'' Bielema said. "We've tried to do the same.'' How then does the success of one sport im- pact the success of the other, if it does? "If you look at schools where one (sport) is not very good, it's not going to help (the other),'' suggested UW basketball assistant coach Gary Close. "But it's not going to be an end-all in terms of not allowing somebody to be successful.
