The game is never over

Life as an assistant coach--from scouting to teaching to recruiting--can be all-consuming, as Shawn Hood of Wisconsin knows all tee well

Standing in the corner of the visiting coaches' locker room at Michigan State, Wisconsin assistant Shawn Hood stares blankly at a cart filled with medical supplies: tape, bandages, cotton swabs. There is nothing on it to dull this pain, but he wouldn't see it if there were. He is not seeing anything. Or he is seeing defeat. One of the two.

This afternoon's loss to the Spartans does not have Hood's name on it. It belongs to the Badgers, 10-4 overall and 1-3 in the Big Ten after falling in overtime on the nation's toughest homecourt. It belongs to Brad Soderberg, 8-3 as interim head coach since Dick Bennett's sudden retirement in late November Hood is like every other assistant coach. He has no numbers other than the one to his cell phone,.

This is how the accounting is done in college basketball, but it is more complex than that. Everyone who spent a moment on the Badgers' bench this afternoon at the Breslin Center owns a piece of the result.

But the path a Division I assistant travels toward that result is different. The odyssey that ended with a 69-59 loss to Michigan State last Saturday began for Hood and the Badgers the previous Wednesday with a loss at Purdue that was almost as crashing. Through nearly three days of preparing for the opening tip against the Spartans, Hood lectured in practice, participated in drills, watched videotape and discussed strategy with other members of the coaching staff Mixed into all that were hours spent on the telephone and on the road working to recruit the next generation of Badgers.

Now in his seventh season as a Wisconsin assistant, Hood has played a part in attracting nearly every member of the team, including a special part in the recruitment of Roy Boone--the Badgers' leading scorer against Michigan State but also their self-confessed goat in this game.

"There were several times during the course of the postgame interactions with Brad and our coaching staff where I wanted to almost apologize to him for Roy," Hood admits. "But it's not like that. We're all in this together. And Roy plays for all of us. It's about us. It's no one's fault."

`Where do we go from here?'

It's Thursday morning. The game at Michigan State is 59 hours away, the loss at Purdue is just eight hours old, and that degree of reality is best dealt with unconsciously. So Hood wakes up on Thursday for his daily workout at 6:30 a.m., an hour later than usual. "After losses," he says, "getting up in the morning is like death."

With that one small adjustment, he takes his typical 40-minute trudge on the treadmill, watching an ESPN SportsCenter repeat as he works. It's his one connection to a college basketball world other than his own. Among assistant coaches, he is different in this way. At 35, he wants to become a head coach as much as anyone, but he mostly ignores the coaching grapevine that buzzes with information about job openings, likely job openings and possible job openings. He watches few games on television. Although CBS had broadcast Michigan State's visit to Indiana five days earlier, he skipped it and spent the time with his kids. Hood and his wife, Kim, have two young children, Brian and Taylor, and Hood is stepfather to Kim's teenage daughter, Brittany.

With his attention divided almost entirely between his Badgers and his family, having the TV on during workouts is the best way for Hood to get updates on other Big Ten results and national basketball news. But what flickers from the screen this morning? Purdue's Rodney Smith making mat 12-foot jumper inside the final two minutes, when the Badgers neglected to double-team in the post. Boilers guard Carson Cunningham driving for a decisive 3-point play against Boone's suddenly suspect on-the-ball defense. Wisconsin dropping a close decision.

The game ended, but it's not over. "It's never really over," senior guard Mike Kelley says. "You always think about the dumb foul you made or the shot you could have hit to win the game."

Soderberg stayed up until 3 a.m. reliving the loss, running through game tape and cataloguing the Badgers' defensive errors. When he meets with the team before practice, he'll list 35 on a marking board, the last 14 in red--because they happened in the dosing minutes, when Wisconsin surrendered a two-point lead.

But as Soderberg enters the 9:30 a.m. staff meeting, he wants to face forward. "Where do we go from here?" he says.

There is enough concern among the coaches about problems defending the ball that not even five minutes of the meeting pass before assistant Tony Bennett suggests having a zone defense in place. Though this is one of those programs that considers zone to be a four-letter word, Soderberg concedes it crossed his mind. It quickly is settled. Maybe the Badgers never will use the zone, but it'll be ready.