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BY MIKE LUCAS • UWBADGERS.COM
PHOTOS BY DAVID STLUKA
ince most college basketball teams, Wisconsin included, are still very much a "work in
progress" in November, this is the perfect setting for a two-game tournament; a hotel complex
under construction, more hard hat than Hard Rock.
The gym/ballroom for the Cancun Challenge reminded UW freshman Bronson Koenig of some
makeshift AAU venues that typically dot the summer landscape. "It's not totally new to me," he said,
"the low ceiling and everything else like that."
But everything else is new to Koenig and his
freshmen classmates who are making the transition
from being the marquee players on their high school
teams to being slowly integrated into a structured
college system. Like the others, Koenig is a work in
progress.
"The game is a lot quicker and the people are just
a lot bigger and stronger," said Koenig, also pointing
to a much greater emphasis on the defensive positioning that "you have to be in all the time. You can't
relax."
Not when you're playing catch-up, which has been
Koenig's mode since last spring when he injured his
hamstring while running track at La Crosse Aquinas
High School. While rounding the corner on a relay,
he heard something he had never heard before, a
"pop."
Going through the rehab for his hamstring, he
said, entailed "taking a break from basketball while
trying to get healthy." But there were unexpected
consequences. "My lower back started hurting me,"
he said.
Agreeing that the tightness that he was feeling
in his back may have been the result of overcompensating for his hamstring, Koenig said, "My back
really started hurting when I got on campus and I
wasn't able to play the game I can play."
That led to frustration.
"It put him a little bit behind," UW associate head
coach Greg Gard said. "Any time you're a freshman,
every day is a new day and you're learning every
day.
"So missing a few of those days, even though it
wasn't much, it put him just far enough behind that
he wasn't quite in rhythm when we started practice."
Koenig struggled with the timing of it all.
"It was really frustrating not being able to make
the impression that I wanted on my coaches and
teammates," conceded Koenig, who led Aquinas to
state championships as a sophomore and a senior. "I
tried toughening it out, which was a mistake.
"I was hurt for about five months. There was a
point where I could barely dunk anymore; my lower
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