UW Oshkosh women’s Basketball coach Brad Fischer has tied the WIAC record for most 20-win seasons, a record currently held by Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame coach Bo Ryan.
Ryan, best known for coaching the University of Wisconsin men’s basketball team, coached UW-Platteville’s men’s squad from 1985-1999 where he had 12 20-win seasons and 5 final four appearances with 4 national championships from 1987-1999.
Fischer, who has coached UWO since 2012, said that there’s a reason why a women’s basketball coach hasn’t had 12 20-win seasons in the WIAC before.
“There’s a lot of variables in Division III, you know, there’s a lot of reasons and a lot of opportunities for players to step aside,” Fischer said. “It’s obviously not getting financially compensated to play so, they all have goals in school and goals in life and for our girls, year after year, to stick with it to continue to get better and still love the Division III motto of being a student athlete and being great in the classroom [is great].”
According to Fischer, Ryan is the one of the best coaches in the state of Wisconsin. After all his high coaching accolades, Ryan was named WIAC coach of the year on six occasions, and was named National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC) Coach of the Year four times in Division III.
Ryan, who owned a 353-76 record with the Pioneers, won national championships in 1990-91,1994-95,1997-98 and 1998-99, leading D III with an 82.2 winning percentage by the time he left for UW-Milwaukee.
Ryan said the culture of his Platteville teams were amazing and that he took pride in winning.
“The team took pride in not letting the school down,” Ryan said. “Mentally as a team we always had a chance.”
Both Fischer and Ryan said they value their players’ education and sometimes struggled to have a full team practice due to night classes, labs or student teaching.
“The toughest part [during the season] was the engineering labs that players had to go to,” Ryan said. “We usually never had a practice with the whole team there because of engineering labs, but 90% of our players had a 30 or above on the ACT.”
Fischer also said that his program is built in the classroom, and the team works around players’ schedules in order to prepare for gameday.
“There are just so many ways that we can talk about our program that doesn’t come down with the wins,” Fischer said. “An extra bonus is that I can say we’ve got a 3.17 GPA and you know we don’t have girls transfer out of our program. We also win too, so to be able to kind of check all those boxes on what’s important for our program at our level you know, ‘do you have great students, do you have great people,’ and if you can answer yes to both of those, you’ve got everything you could hope for.”
Fischer said that despite having to deal with different class schedules, similar to what Ryan had to deal with at Platteville, UWO has still been able to find success.
“It’s actually pretty rare during the school year that we have everyone at practice between just random night classes, labs, and we had student teachers this year that were missing stuff and so it’s pretty rare that for practices we have everyone,” he said. “That’s the way it is and you know we have that same conversation with recruits too like if you have to take a 4- 5:30 class on Mondays and Wednesdays you just take it and we figure it out.”
Both coaches also value summer workouts. Ryan said that during the summer he would set up a conditioning class for his athletes, which were pool workouts and agility drills, so the athletes would be in shape heading into the following season.
“Every contest we went into we were the best in shape,” Ryan said.
Fischer said he always wanted his players to stay connected and in touch with each other to keep the team close.
“When its time to work out in the summer, when you know, [the players are] not on campus with us, that’s [a big focus],” he said. “At D-I basketball and even D-II, they usually stay on campus and practice together during the summer. Our girls have to go their separate ways, but they do their own thing so you can trust them to spend their off-season getting better and investing in our team. They can have a great balanced life but still be great at basketball and help us win year after year.”
Fischer’s squad is 21-2 and is in prime position to win the regular season WIAC championship for the second straight year.
