Kevin Borseth had feelings for his team when it played against No. 22 Creighton. Although he was warming up and having pregame discussions in an unfamiliar locker room, he didn't feel nervous. Instead, the Green Bay team exuded confidence.
They would win, he thought.
Borseth was right. Phoenix upset Creighton 65-53. The following week, they defeated No. 23 Washington State, 59-48, to set the tone for the season.
“Some people hope to win, and some know they will win,” Borseth said. “This is one of those teams that knows they can win. And it's hard to come by.”
Phoenix made 14 NCAA Tournament appearances under his direction, and Borseth turned the program into a mid-major powerhouse, a team expected to win the Horizon League every year.
On Thursday, Phoenix will play Youngstown State in the Horizon League quarterfinals. You must win 3 times in a row to get the automatic bid.
It's been five years since Green Bay last appeared in March Madness. But Borseth says this team has what it takes to break an unwanted losing streak.
He would know. He has coached promising teams, confident teams, and teams in between. Although he has been active in his 41 years with four different programs and three different levels, Borseth remembers each team.
He also remembers that a call from a friend and an unexpected opportunity were the impetus.
Bolseth grew up in Bessemer, a town of 1,805 people in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where he was drawn to track and field. The fact that he is now coaching basketball was all about timing and opportunity. Borseth would have coached any sport, he said, but he also dabbled in baseball and football.
“I’ve always been a sweatshirt person,” he said. “I'm not a businessman by any means.”
So when his friend and former high school teammate Deke Rousseau called him in 1982 and told him he had a coaching job available, Borseth jumped at the opportunity.
Rousseau coached women's basketball at Gogebic Community College for seven years before moving to the men's team. His athletic director had someone with more coaching experience in mind as a candidate, but Rousseau overruled him. He knew Borsels was the right person.
Rousseau coached at Gojevich for 31 years and said hiring Borseth was his “best recruiting job.”
Borseth quickly became interested in coaching. That was a good thing because coaching takes up all of my time. It was a complicated gig with multiple responsibilities.
Borseth taught classes during the day and led the women's team in practice in the afternoon. She helped Rousseau's men's team in the evenings.
Then, at 9 p.m., Borseth drove 20 minutes to a local minimum-security prison, where he opened the gym to inmates.
At first, his job was simply to open the gym and watch inmates use weight machines, jump ropes, and punching bags. Some of them liked to shoot hoops, but Coach Borseth couldn't help but be drawn to the court.
He started by implementing a few rules and evolved from there.
“One thing led to another,” he said. “And eventually he ended up bringing in a team from outside to play against them.”
Running an open gym in a prison may seem a far cry from coaching a Division I women's basketball program, but at its core, all coaching is the same, Borseth said. And his days at the Ojibway Correctional Facility taught him one of his most important coaching lessons.
“I learned that you get more out of it if you listen to the person playing,” he said. “So with every team I've coached since then, I've started listening to the players a lot more because they're doing their job. They should have had their say. ”
Over the years, that idea has morphed into Borseth's most important and most unconventional coaching tenet. “The name on the back of the jersey is more important than the name on the front.”
This directly contradicts the coaching cliché that touts the importance of the team over the individual. But Borseth takes the opposite approach.
“It's all about people,” Borseth said. “I think our job as coaches is to help our young athletes feel confident in themselves, and to do that we have to spend time putting their names on the back of their jerseys. ”
As the college basketball landscape changes, Borseth continues to hold onto that philosophy. While Borseth knows basketball is a business and winning is the ultimate goal, she still wants it to be fun for her players. However, as Rousseau said, “He is one of the most competitive athletes.”
Borseth has won at every level, with a career record of 747 wins and 295 losses. After coaching for five years at Gozibic, Borseth coached at Division II Michigan Technological University, where he led the Huskies to the Final Four in 1993. Then came the call from Green Bay.
Borseth is currently in his second stint as Phoenix's head coach. He led the program from 1998 to 2007 before taking the head coaching job at Michigan.
But there's a big difference between coaching at the mid-major level and coaching at the Big Ten level.
“The higher you climb, the less room you have to breathe,” he said.
And after five years, Borses wanted to breathe again. So he returned to a program that felt like home.
This gives Borseth the opportunity to be closer to his five children, who live in the Green Bay area, and enjoy a few more years with his parents, who were in their 90s when they returned. It's done. Green Bay is 345 miles from Bessemer, while the distance between Bolseth's hometown and Ann Arbor is 577 miles.
Borseth picked up where he left off, leading Phoenix to the NCAA Tournament five times in six years. This success has made Green Bay an attractive landing spot for local talent. Ten of the 13 players on this season's roster are from Wisconsin.
“Being local and having the opportunity to play for a strong mid-major program made it easy for me to come here,” said Natalie McNeil, who originally attended St. Louis and then returned to her home state.
She also wanted to play for Borses.
“He encourages you to work hard to get what you get. Nothing is given to you,” McNeil said. “But at the same time, he treats us like daughters. He treats us like family.”
At this point in his career, Borseth's basketball family is extensive. “I attend a lot of weddings,” he said with a laugh. But he remembers every moment of his 41 years.
He remembers his first team at Gojibic, when he asked the players to do line drills and the captain surprised him by yelling, “You're not running hard!”
Early on, he saw two players in Green Bay studying under a tree on a 90-degree day and wondered why they didn't go swimming somewhere else instead. I remember that.
He remembers Lindsay Robson hitting a half-court shot against No. 18 Syracuse in 2019 that forced overtime and ultimately led to Green Bay's upset.
“I have a lot of really fond memories,” Borseth said.
But he doesn't have it on this team. still.
“I hope that moment still comes,” he said.
