The Packers couldn't quite pull off an undefeated season. Another team from Green Bay still has a shot.
The Wisconsin-Green Bay women's basketball team is 19-0 going into Saturday's game against Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Given their dominant stature in the Horizon League, the Phoenix stand a pretty good chance of getting to the NCAA tournament without a loss.
Success isn't anything new for the Phoenix, who have more or less controlled their conference for more than a decade. But after last year's surprising second-round victory over Michigan State in the NCAA tournament, people are starting to notice.
Green Bay was No. 10 in The Associated Press poll this week, the program's first appearance in the top 10.
''You can feel it a little bit,'' Phoenix coach Matt Bollant said. ''It's definitely ramped up this week. And so as a coach, it feels good. But at the same time, we've got to be concerned about how we handle this. Do we keep doing the right things? How did we get to here? And making sure that we're focused on the right things. But I'm happy for our program. We've got a great story to tell.''
Green Bay suddenly finds itself in some pretty elite company, ranked near women's basketball royalty such as Tennessee and Connecticut; at 22-0, No. 1 Baylor is the only other unbeaten team in Division I.
It's safe to say Green Bay is doing it a different way.
Bollant said only one player on his roster, forward Jenny Gilbertson, even got a scholarship offer from a school in a BCS conference coming out of high school. Senior Julie Wojta, the team's leading scorer and rebounder, acknowledges that Green Bay is a ''little bit different'' from other top programs.
''We haven't been able to recruit the top talent in the nation,'' Wojta said. ''So it's special, what we do with this team, from the standpoint of, we're not the most athletic against teams that we play. We're not the tallest and things like that. You really have to focus on the little pieces of the game, the fundamentals.''
The makeup of Bollant's roster is a direct reflection of his program's limited recruiting budget. He jokes that per dollar, his is the best program in the nation.
Seven of the 13 players are from Wisconsin. Five of the other six are from border states Illinois and Minnesota. One, redshirt freshman Megan Lukan, is from Canada.
''Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, Indiana all produce way more Division I players'' than Wisconsin, Bollant said. ''But the one thing I'll say about Wisconsin kids, most of the time they're hard-nosed. They believe in work ethic, they believe in being coached. We coach them really hard and they take it well.''
So when the Phoenix meet a more athletic opponent, their only formula for winning is hard work.
''I think if you polled coaches and talked to coaches (around) the country, I think they'd say Green Bay plays as hard as anybody in the country,'' Bollant said. ''A lot of coaches have said that to us after we play, or in the summertime.''
They're tough, too.
''We have to be physical,'' Wojta said. ''We don't want to be pushed around. And we know that the teams in our conference that we're playing right now, they're good and they make us work. But we want to beat the best. So for us to do that, we have to have intense practices and we can't be just OK with having an OK night when we play a team in conference. Because that's not going to get us where we want to be.''
And while Bollant wants the team to block out any talk of going undefeated, the thought has at least occurred to junior forward Lydia Bauer.
''I don't think you can completely ignore it, but at the same time, I don't think you want to make it a focus,'' Bauer said. ''It'd be a great thing to do. But a loss on the record has never hurt a team in the end. So I think it's a goal, but I don't think it's a focus of ours.''
Of course, it wasn't so long ago that people in Green Bay were talking about the Packers going undefeated.
Bauer is a native of Lake Zurich, Ill. and a - gasp! - Chicago Bears fan. But her roommates are Packers fans, so she ended up embracing this year's team. And she took a lesson from the Packers' playoff loss to the New York Giants.
''Even though I can't say that I'm a Packers fan, I'm a fan of their team and the style of play that they have,'' Bauer said. ''What I took away from it is, you've got to come ready, every day. And you can't let up. Everyone's coming for you.''
The Phoenix drew some inspiration from the Packers at the start of the season, wearing shirts that said ''BTH'' on the back. It stood for ''Be The Hunter,'' a theme Packers coach Mike McCarthy emphasized to his team this season.
''I thought that was really neat,'' Bauer said. ''We share that connection with the Packers, which is a unique thing for a small town that has an NFL team. We take things from each other, and I think we can learn from the Packers, what to do and what not to do.''
