GREEN BAY, Wis. -- The roads tell a story in this town. With names like Reggie White Way and Tony Canadeo Run, they lead you ever closer to the corner of Lombardi Ave. and Oneida St., where one of the enduring icons of American sports rises from the neighborhood yards around it.
But if you're a women's basketball fan, Lambeau Field isn't the only bucket-list experience to be found two hours north of Milwaukee.
The "Green Bay Way" isn't a thoroughfare found via GPS, but it remains a remarkable road to success.
On the night the hometown Phoenix unveiled banners commemorating another Horizon League title and a trip to the NCAA tournament, the Wisconsin Badgers ended up as the unfortunate road kill on the Green Bay Way. The Big Ten school with an enrollment nearly seven times that of the Green Bay branch scored the game's first basket, only to see the Phoenix go on a 69-41 run over the final 39 minutes and 48 seconds.
Green Bay had eight previous wins in 26 meetings against the Badgers prior to Thursday's encounter. Those wins came by a total of 36 points, a margin that seemed within reach Thursday night alone. Wisconsin coach Lisa Stone offered perhaps the most apt description when asked if the 69-43 final was an eye-opener.
The guards at Buckingham Palace change with less precision than the Phoenix switch assignments.
"More like a slug in the face is what it was," Stone said.
Stone has done well rebuilding the Badgers into regular postseason visitors the last four seasons, and her team was without star guard Alyssa Karel on this night. She also had plenty on her mind after the game with regard to her own team, let alone worrying about Green Bay's roster. But it was still hard to miss her momentary uncertainty about how to pronounce Green Bay post Julie Wojta's last name in response to a postgame question.
Like most of the Green Bay roster, Wojta is a Wisconsin native (nine of the Phoenix are in-state products, the other five players are from neighboring states or nearby Ontario). And like the rest of Green Bay's roster, she was not on the recruiting radar for the big school in Madison. Following on the work of former coach Kevin Borseth, and Carol Hammerle before him, fourth-year coach Matt Bollant, who got his coaching start in the Wisconsin high school ranks, maintains a dynasty out of the undersized, overlooked team captains bigger schools pass over. All of which made a win like Thursday all the sweeter.
"I think that's got to be special to you," Bollant said. "Sure, as a coach you can say this is just another game, but it's not. It's the Badgers. In Wisconsin it's what people think about, and for them to come to our place and us handle them, it's really special for our players. A lot of our players weren't recruited by the Badgers -- in fact, none of our players were recruited by the Badgers. So to have [those Green Bay players] come here and play the way they did just shows a lot of courage. That's a pretty neat thing."
If the Packers are famously a community-owned team, the Phoenix are a slightly different variation on the theme. In a college basketball landscape littered with overbearing CEO coaches, Green Bay is a player-owned program. Bollant is no mere docent, but once out on the floor, senior captains Celeste Hoewisch and Kayla Tetschlag are just as likely to emphasize a teaching point or take a teammate aside and work through some small technique tweak.
"You don't want to be the one person to let your teammate down," Tetschlag said. "If you feel that sense of accountability, then you're going to hold yourself to a higher standard. That's how we want it, and that's proven by the success we've had."
Bollant and his staff are as good as any at making sure the players know what to do. What is different in Green Bay is the ownership players take in understanding why they're doing it.
"I came here, and that's what they had done before," Bollant said. "I've always believed the best teams are player-coached teams. They're the ones who have got to get it done on the floor. It doesn't matter what the head coach knows. It matters what they know.
"One of the things I asked when I first came here was, 'What made you trust Kevin?' And they said 'Because he'd ask us and because our opinion mattered.'"
None of that is new in Green Bay, which is why the program hasn't missed the postseason since the 1996-97 season. What is new, at least in relation to last season's team, is a defensive acumen that forced Wisconsin into 24 turnovers. The game was effectively over when it was barely four minutes old, at which point the Badgers had taken one shot and committed six turnovers against a steady diet of pressure. In three games, including wins against George Washington and Minnesota, Green Bay has forced 73 turnovers.
They give away inches against some teams, but all five players can play defense anywhere on the court -- it might not have been an ideal matchup for the Phoenix, but that included a play or two against Wisconsin where, after a switch, the 5-foot-7 Hoewisch stuck her nose (and forearms and legs) in against 6-4 Lin Zastrow in the paint. With last season's team returned essentially intact, players like sophomores Adrian Ritchie, Sarah Eichler and Lydia Bauer are better integrated within a system that relies on five parts playing in unison -- the guards at Buckingham Palace change with less precision than the Phoenix switch assignments.
"We're way better defensively," Bollant said. "Minnesota put up 75 and made some great plays against us, but we are significantly better defensively. We're bigger, we're much tougher. Those freshmen [last season], it's just hard for freshmen to be good defensively. … Every kid is a year older, a year smarter, a year more used to the system and just our mental transitions are better."
Of all the numbers against Wisconsin, perhaps the most remarkable was the scale of the victory on a night when Tetschlag scored just two points. The Horizon League preseason player of the year is a proven commodity on the big stage after scoring 29 points from every part of the court in a second-round NCAA tournament game against Iowa State last season. But between a couple of early fouls that cost her minutes and a lot of energy expended on defense in neutralizing bigger Badgers, this wasn't her night on the offensive end, ceding those duties to do-everything guard Hoewisch, who finished with 22 points.
Not that it kept Sheboygan native Tetschlag from smiling after the game. And not that it kept fans from keeping her busy signing autographs for the better part of half an hour.
"I sat on the bench a lot in the first half, but I had a blast because the rest of my teammates were stepping up," Tetschlag said. "Everybody was contributing, and it's so fun to see the growth that some of these younger girls have had and their ability to put their new skills into the game -- and do it right when we need them to. With everybody contributing, it's that collective victory, and it feels a lot more fun to have it that way."
If you don't mind adding a few more layers to fight the cold and if your arteries are hardy enough to handle cheese curds breaded and deep fried to a golden brown -- the way God surely intended His curds to be served -- Green Bay offers a sports experience not to be missed. And if time allows while you're in town, there's also that football stadium.
