By Gordon Mann, D3hoops.com

About 25 miles southwest of Philadelphia, in the blue-collar suburb of Aston, Pennsylvania, sits a youth sports complex tucked behind the Township’s community center.

Aston has made the most of this space, positioning its softball fields so they share outfields and the outfields so they can split their time as the football field for the Aston Bandits youth team. The primary softball field gets the honor of a tarped backstop that reads “Lady Bandits” and the lone scoreboard that marks the name of the facility – the “Butch” Ryan Complex.

“My dad was unbelievable,” says William “Bo” Ryan. His voice fills with the warmth of a son talking about the dad he admires. “He did so much for youth sports.”

Butch, who passed away in 2013, is a local celebrity in this part of Pennsylvania.  He was one of the founders for the Bandits Athletic Association football team, which has almost as many bumper stickers in town as the Philadelphia Eagles. Butch coached Biddy basketball teams, baseball teams and the American Legion team. He was the head coach for countless Delaware County kids, including NFL All-Pro Billy “White Shoes” Johnson and major league baseball catcher Ben Davis. But Butch was seldom the head coach for Bo’s teams growing up because he didn’t want that to be the reason his son played sports.

Since Bo was a talented athlete playing multiple sports in a small town, it was inevitable that the Ryan household would eventually become a house divided.

“He wouldn’t coach me in the Biddy (basketball) league,” Bo recalls. “One game I scored 40 points on him. He didn’t talk to me for three days. We got home and he went into his room. My mother said, ‘I guess I know who won.’”

Bo was a multi-sport star at Chester High School where he was the captain of the Clippers’ baseball team, quarterback for the football team and point guard for the basketball team, which is still the pride of Chester, years after its manufacturing fortunes have faded into memory. “Playing at Chester was quite the experience. You were somebody. If you made the cut, that spoke volumes.”

Ryan more than made the cut. As a senior, he was the backcourt leader on a Chester High team that went on an undefeated run to the 1965 Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association semifinals where it lost to Steelton-Highspire. Ryan was thinking about attending college at Temple or Rutgers, which played in the NCAA’s University Division back when there were just two – University as a precursor to Division I and College as a precursor to Division II.

Ron Rainey, who had been Ryan's head basketball coach at Chester High, took a new job as the head coach at Wilkes College in the northeast corner of the state, and Rainey encouraged his senior point guard to join him. Over the summer Ryan had played against College scholarship players on the courts at “the Cage” in Chester’s west end, and he figured there wasn’t much of a difference between those who played at Wilkes and those who played for local teams at the University level. So Ryan applied to Wilkes and, because he was the class president in high school, he got a leadership grant that made it possible to go there.

Rainey and Ryan joined a Colonels’ program that had been undermanned and overwhelmed. While Rainey and Ryan were leading Chester High to the state tournament semifinals, Wilkes spent the 1965 season going 3-17, and the roster listed in the NCAA’s archive shows just five players. Three seasons later, Wilkes had its first winning season in a decade with junior guard Bo Ryan scoring 13.8 points per game. The Colonels edged their record up to 13-11 in Ryan’s senior season.

Ryan was drafted after his senior season at Wilkes, but not into the NBA. He was drafted into the Army where he served as a military policeman. Three years later he returned to the area where he grew up, looking for teaching and coaching jobs. A few blocks from the sports complex that now bears his father’s name, Bo Ryan took a job at Brookhaven Junior High School as a social sciences teacher, head basketball coach and assistant baseball coach.

Eight years after one college basketball coaching vacancy pulled Bo Ryan out of the Philadelphia suburbs, it happened again.

Bill Cofield had been a successful head coach for two seasons at NAIA member Lincoln University in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Cofield went 38-12 in two seasons with the Lions and then moved on to become the head coach at Prairie View A&M. After four seasons in Texas, Cofield decided to interview for the head coaching job at UW-Milwaukee.

Cofield didn’t get that job but, while waiting for his flight home from Wisconsin, he crossed paths with an administrator from Dominican College, an NAIA program in Racine, Wisconsin. Coincidentally, he was on his way to interview a candidate for that school’s head coaching vacancy. The two struck up a conversation, which led to an interview and Cofield landing the job at Dominican.

Cofield needed to fill out his coaching staff for the upcoming season, so he dipped back into his Pennsylvania roots, calling one of his former players at Lincoln. That player said he had just started a new job at an insurance company and couldn’t come to Wisconsin, but recommended Cofield call this former player from Chester named Bo Ryan.

Cofield thanked him for the recommendation and called an another Lincoln alum who said the same thing – a new job at a paper company prevented him from going to Dominican, but Cofield should talk to this young guy from Chester named Bo Ryan. After hearing two recommendations in five minutes, Cofield called Ryan and offered him the assistant coaching job. Ryan accepted and left the Philadelphia suburbs for colder weather. Cofield and Ryan only spent one season together at Dominican – the basketball team went 14-15 and Ryan was named Coach of the Year in baseball – before the college closed.

Ryan headed back to Aston where he graduated from his position as head coach at Brookhaven Junior High School to head coach at Sun Valley High School. Ryan told Cofield that he’d be interested in trying college coaching again when Cofield needed to build his staff again. Three seasons later Cofield was named the head coach at Division I Wisconsin in Madison, and Ryan moved back north, this time for good.

Ryan spent seven seasons as an assistant on the Badgers’ staff before he got his first collegiate head coaching job at UW-Platteville in 1984. Platteville plays at the Division III level as members of Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, which was then known as the Wisconsin State University Conference.

That conference had just started sending teams to the NCAA Division III basketball tournament, with UW-Whitewater going as the Conference's first representative in the 1984. Whitewater represented well, going all the way to the national semifinals. The next season UW-Whitewater won the national championship while conference mates UW-Stevens Point, led by future NBA All-Star Terry Porter, finished as runners up in the 1984 NAIA Division I tournament.

As good as the Wisconsin teams were at the top of the conference, Platteville had a much lower profile when Ryan arrived in 1984. The Pioneers had gone 16-62 in the three seasons leading up to the 1984-1985 season, which saw a modest improvement to 9-17. Platteville posted winning seasons in Ryan’s second and third seasons and then arrived full force in 1988 when the Pioneers went 24-5 and won the conference.

When asked about the turnaround in his fourth season, Ryan says it was simply a matter of the freshmen he recruited in his first season maturing into seniors. “I’m a teacher. I’ve always felt that, in coaching, it was our job to get [the players] better.”

In 1991 the Pioneers made their first trip to the NCAA Division III tournament and put up eye-popping wins over Christopher Newport (110-50) and Illinois Benedictine (101-65). The final two games of the national tournament were closer, but still Platteville victories. The Pioneers edged Otterbein 96-94 in the national semifinals and topped Franklin and Marshall 81-74 in the title game.

In 1995 Platteville became the second Division III men’s basketball team to complete a perfect season, going 31-0 and winning the Division’s first 64-team tournament. The national championship game was a preview of future Big 10 battles as Bo Ryan’s Pioneers beat Steve Alford’s Manchester Spartans, 69-55.  That season the Pioneers made more free throws (688) then their opponents took (461).

Two seasons later, the Pioneers posted another season that looks like a statistical misprint. In 1997 Platteville gave up just 47.5 points per game, without employing an offense that intentionally and repeatedly ran down the 35-second shot clock in use at that time. That season ended with a 46-43 loss to UW-Stevens Point in the NCAA Tournament.

“We didn’t hold the ball,” Ryan recalls. “We were pretty comfortable with the ball. That’s a record we’re really proud of. Defensively, [the players] were in synch and really played together.”

In 1998 Platteville allowed a few more points per game (62.1) but had fewer losses. The Pioneers went 30-0 and defeated Hope College 69-56 in the national title game, narrowly missing a matchup with Ryan’s alma mater Wilkes, which lost to Hope in the semifinals.

Ryan finished his career at Platteville the next season with what is arguably the greatest game in NCAA Division III men's basketball tournament history.

The Pioneers faced Hampden-Sydney College, which brought a full house to the Salem (Va.) Civic Center from its campus just two hours away. The Hampden-Sydney fans were on the edge of euphoria when their Tigers held a 66-63 lead over Platteville with less than a minute to play in overtime. The Pioneers got the ball to forward Mike Jones, who had attempted six three-pointers all season. As Ryan says, “[Jones] got the ball, stared down the shot and hit it.”

In the second extra period, Platteville won the game on Colin Gasner’s back-door reverse layup with 20 seconds left.

When asked about Gasner’s shot, Ryan returns to teaching mode, wanting us to understand the preparation that led to success. “When someone dribbles toward you, you go to the rim for the backdoor cut.” You can hear the chalk scratching against the chalk board, see the furrowed brow as Ryan coaches us up.

The victory was vintage Ryan with a three pointer from a forward and a layup from a guard. 

"When we were in practice, all the guards ran the post plays and all the post players knew how to play from the perimeter because you never know what'll hapenn in the game."

Covering the national championship game for D3hoops.com, Mark Simon caught a special moment between Bo and his father. 

“After his team won its fourth national championship this decade, UW-Platteville coach Bo Ryan took a break from the midst of a celebratory hug to see his 75-year old father Butch standing by the foul line, holding up a sign.

It said "BRING ON DUKE!"

Sixteen years later Butch got his wish.

In 2015 Bo Ryan led Wisconsin past an undefeated Kentucky team and into Division I national championship game against Duke.

When asked what he remembers most about Platteville’s double-overtime victory over Hampden-Sydney, Ryan offers a joke.

“After that game I said, ‘It took us double overtime to win a championship. I’m getting out of here and going D1 because [the Division III coaches] are gaining on me.”

Once again, the joke was prescient. In 1999 Ryan took the head coaching job at Division I UW-Milwaukee and then, two years later, he became the head coach at UW-Madison. He won 364 games with the Badgers, went to the Division I NCAA Tournament all 15 seasons and reached the Final Four in his last two.

Despite all that success, Ryan never forgot about Division III or made it seem like he had somehow moved past small college basketball. When he became the Badgers’ head coach, he approached the Wisconsin Athletic Director about playing exhibition games against the WIAC schools on a rotating basis, starting of course with Platteville, so the Division III athletes could have the Division I experience.

Two decades after his last win as a Division III head coach, the memories and stories come easily from Ryan.

He had an unparalleled run of success at Platteville during the 1990s, going 240-22 (.916) with four national championships over that decade. After losing 39 games in his first three seasons at Platteville, Ryan lost 37 combined in his next 12 and never won fewer than 23 games again. Ben Hoffman, who played at Platteville from 1994 through 1998, lost six games total under Ryan.

Twenty years later, Ryan hasn’t lost touch with the basketball community in Platteville. Every year he goes back to celebrate with former players and fans from those teams because those are memories and moments he cherishes in his retirement.

Ryan also hasn’t lost his knack for teaching, something he learned first from his father, then from Ron Rainey, and then on his own as a middle school and high school teacher in Aston. He credits the experience of preparing a lesson plan for 30 pupils on a daily basis with his success in teaching wave after wave of college basketball players how to succeed.

“Teaching still matters. As coaches, we don’t have all the answers. So we tell the players, ‘Let’s find them together.’”