37
By sharpening their resolve as a group, they
took something positive from a negative.
"Sometimes adversity toughens people up,"
Gard said. "We needed to have a little of that. We
weren't playing well enough and we needed to get
better. And it wasn't about changing things. We
just had to get better at the things that we were
doing. Do that, and I knew that we'd see results.
"Sometimes adversity calluses people. They un-
derstand now the value of every possession and
how important blocking out is, how important
stopping dribble penetration is, how important
getting to the free throw line is. You can talk about
it. But sometimes it takes the sting of a couple
of losses."
Like the sting of last season's first round loss
to Mississippi in the NCAA tournament.
"At the beginning of this year," Sam Dekker
recounted, "We came together as a group and
we said, 'Last year doesn't signify what this
program is about.' We have higher priorities
and goals that we want to set and, together, we
said we wanted to go to Dallas (and the Final
Four)."
Dekker and Jackson implied as much at the
team's media day in mid-October. Jackson, in
fact, addressed those expectations in August.
"Right before we went to Canada," he said of
the exhibition tour, "I was telling everyone,
'Why not us? Why can't we do the things that
we want to do?"'
Some may have misconstrued what Jackson
was saying; Gasser and his teammates did not.
"All that was meant," Gasser said, "was that
we wanted to expand our goals; we wanted to
shoot for the stars, go for it all, why can't we do
it? We have the talent, we have the coaching,
we have everything we need. We just needed to
believe that we could do it."
The Badgers went 16-0 to start the season. It
was a school record, but it was quick sand, too.
"We were able to win a lot of games early be-
cause we had experienced guards," Gard said.
"Anytime you've got good guards, you've al-
ways got a chance. But our frontline had to ma-
ture a little bit. A lot of what we do defensively
is predicated on ours 4's and 5's being able to
help."
Especially, he stressed, off dribble penetra-
"Strength, to me, is always in the group,"
Helland said. This group, in particular,
draws strength from one another.
They're genuinely happy for one anoth-
er's success. They understand that they're
all intimately linked with one another
for success. That's what makes this
(Final Four) a remarkable achievement."
