MADISON, Wis., March 29 – Dick Bennett used to make his little brother, Jack, throw him batting practice over and over again before every baseball season, working to get his timing down just right. When football season came around, the brothers went through the same thing, as Dick tried to adjust to catching a football again.

"I'd throw until my arm was just hanging," Jack Bennett said. "I saw he had something he wanted to accomplish."

Dick Bennett thought this practice would make him a better third baseman, but it probably made him a better coach. Even then, Dick was finding a way to get the maximum effort from someone.

But the rest of the Bennett clan must have gleaned something from his lessons, as they make up a family tree of basketball players and coaches unmatched by any other. Dick is the head coach at Wisconsin, which has advanced to the Final Four of the NCAA men's basketball tournament. Jack is the coach at Wisconsin-Stevens Point, where Dick was head coach from 1976 to 1985 and where Jack took the team to NCAA Division III tournament round of eight in 1997 and did so again this season before losing on 26-foot three-point shot at the buzzer. Jack's older son, Jay, plays for him at Stevens Point, and Jack's younger son, Nick, will do so next season. Dick's son, Tony, is a team manager at Wisconsin, where he's eyeing a coaching career. (Yes, this is the same Tony Bennett who helped lead Dick's 1991 Wisconsin-Green Bay team to the NCAA tournament.) Dick's daughter, Kathi, became Indiana's head women's coach Tuesday, after four years at Evansville and a stint at Wisconsin-Oshkosh in which she won an NCAA Division II women's championship.

Dick and Kathi are the only father and daughter to simultaneously coach Division I basketball teams, and both led their teams to the NCAA tournament last season. Kathi Bennett said during a news conference at Indiana yesterday that she owes at least some of her success to her family upbringing.

"I certainly have a vision of what championship basketball is and what it looks like," she said. "I've been able to learn as I grew up, kind of like a family business."

The coaches try to discuss topics other than basketball when they get together, but the topic is hard to avoid.

"Do we talk buckets? Sure, a little," Jack said. "I remember one time, Dick and I kind of isolated ourselves from the family, and we were real involved. I can still remember my younger brother Tom, who passed away. He marched in and said, 'Do you two want to join the rest of us for the holiday?'"

Away from family gatherings, the Bennetts talk about the sport even more intently.

"We'll bounce things off of each other," Jack said. "I try to be my own person, but certainly, I'm not just talking about the X's and O's. I try to emulate his relations with players, his honesty, his ethics. I think I admire his personal approach just as much. When you find something good, you imitate it."

Dick has been called a system coach, but such a description is not quite accurate. His "system" is based on a few things – fierce defense, a motion offense and relentless effort – and doing them well. He borrowed the framework from another Wisconsin coaching legend, Vince Lombardi.

"You couldn't grow up in Wisconsin and not be influenced by Vince Lombardi," Jack said. "He was heavily influenced by that. We all were."

Six of Dick Bennett's 14 Badgers players are from Wisconsin, a state not known for competitive high school hoops, but one that produces "tough-minded kids," according to Bennett.

As a former tough-minded Wisconsin kid himself, he should know. His style of coaching, which he has refined since his first job at Eau Claire Memorial High School, has more than its share of critics.

Bennett cut several seniors from the basketball team in favor of younger players in his first year at Eau Claire, and someone threw a brick through a window of his home soon afterward in likely response. Since then, he has heard all of the criticisms: His teams are too slow. They win ugly – and lose uglier. He's out of touch with modern basketball. Jack thinks that Dick, who got the Wisconsin job when he was 52, didn't get it a day too late. If Dick had been a younger man in the head coach's seat, maybe he would have doubted his style. He might have changed.

But Dick Bennett was a person plenty happy with his situation at Wisconsin-Green Bay, even though he had been bypassed for big-time jobs before Wisconsin finally called after he led Wisconsin-Green Bay to the NCAA tournament in 1993-94 and 1994-95.

"I was at peace," Bennett said. "So much that we built a house in Green Bay. I was only going to coach for another year or two, then take another job at the university."

Still, when given the opportunity to coach the Badgers, he said last week: "It was as simple as, 'If you don't take this opportunity, you're going to carry that with you for the rest of your life.'"

So he put up with the critics when the Badgers followed an appearance in the 1997 NCAA tournament – just Wisconsin's fourth ever – by going 12-19 in 1997-98 and then after being seeded fifth in the 1999 tournament, scored 32 points in a loss to 12th-seeded Southwest Missouri State in the first round.

"We've played a lot of very bad basketball since I've been here," he said. "We've lost a lot of games, but ... I can say that I did it the way I thought I could do it. Not the way [his immediate predecessors] Stu Jackson or Stan Van Gundy could, but the way I wanted to."

He heard the predictions that they would be unable to contain Fresno State's Courtney Alexander in the opening game of this year's tournament. Wearing his wristband with the initials WWJD – What Would Jesus Do? – he held fast to his basketball beliefs. And he won.

In the ninth grade, one of his teachers pulled him aside and said: "Bennett, why are you wasting your time? You're never going to make a living in sports."

The critics are quieter, for now. Some may have even converted, proven wrong by Dick's gentle insistence that maybe, after 35 years of coaching basketball in the state of Wisconsin, he knows how to get players to win.

"I like that it's the one sport where you can always generate a bigger whole than the sum of the parts," Dick said. "There's this creative thing that I love."

Jack will be in Indianapolis on Saturday, when Wisconsin plays Michigan State in a national semifinal. He always said to Dick, "My first Final Four will be when you guys go."

He was kidding at the time, of course. He didn't believe he might have to make plans to travel to Indianapolis until the Badgers defeated top-seeded Arizona. Then he began to make his plans, even though the Badgers had to win two more games almost no one thought they could win.

Ever since Jack Bennett was just a youngster with a bag of baseballs, he has known how successful Dick could be when he had something he wanted to accomplish.

Staff writer Rachel Alexander contributed to this report from Albuquerque and special correspondent Heather A. Dinich from Bloomington, Ind.

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