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“OH HOW” IT IS! great

The Milwaukee basketball team bus pulled into the Klotsche Center & Pavilion in the early morning hours of Dec. 2, 2022. It had been a successful night for the Panthers — the men’s and women’s teams both had beaten Green Bay on the road.

Amanda Braun, the director of athletics, got off the bus and, with duffle bag in hand, started walking to the parking garage in the chilly air. Her spirits already buoyed by the dual victories, she

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by Gary D’Amato

looked up to see the Orthopaedic Hospital of Wisconsin Center, still under construction, lit up against the dark sky.

It was, as she described it recently, a pinch-me moment.

“The bus pulls in and I get off and come around the corner and it was just so cool,” she said. “I almost got emotional looking at it and thinking, ‘This is really happening.’”

A decade after plans were first drawn up for a dedicated practice facility for the men’s and women’s basketball teams, Milwaukee will officially open the OHOW Center with a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 4 p.m. July 26.

The 16,000-square-foot facility, connected by a skywalk to the Klotsche Center & Pavilion, cost $8.1 million and was funded entirely through philanthropic gifts and student-directed segregated fees that were already being collected.

In September 2019, the University received a $2.1 million gift from the Orthopaedic Hospital of Wisconsin for naming rights. Construction began in November 2021. The final finishing touches — branding and murals celebrating the history of Milwaukee teams and individual athletes — will be completed before the grand opening.

The state-of-the-art OHOW Center is a game-changer for Milwaukee, which now has the best practice facility, by far, in the Horizon League.

“Bill Scholl came over to see it,” Braun said of Marquette University’s vice president and director of athletics. “He was like, ‘Wow, this has got to separate you in your league.’ It really does. We’re ahead of everyone now.”

Said women’s head coach Kyle Rechlicz, “This facility, when you look at it, it’s really a high-major facility on a mid-major campus.”

The OHOW Center features a full-size basketball court that mirrors the game surface at the other teams. At times, the baseball, track and basketball teams all practiced in the “K” at the same time, which made for a challenging environment.

Panther Arena. The wood comes from the Menominee Indian Tribe forest and is the same surface used by the Milwaukee Bucks in Fiserv Forum. In addition, there’s a weight room, a film room with theater seating, an auxiliary sports medicine and treatment center and, across the skywalk, women’s and men’s locker rooms and student-athlete lounges.

“I’m a teacher and if that’s your classroom and there’s track athletes running around and baseball players hitting baseballs, it’s difficult to teach and it’s difficult to learn,” said Bart Lundy, the second-year men’s basketball coach. “So, in (the OHOW Center) we’ve got a great learning environment and a great teaching environment.” said BJ Freeman, a guard-forward on the men’s team who averaged 18.2 points last season. “It shows how the boosters and the fans and everybody here is supporting basketball.”

Players on both teams already have been playing pick-up games in the OHOW, and formal practices began in late June. The players have 24-hour access to the facility; fingerprint pads make locks and keypads unnecessary.

Having a dedicated practice facility means the basketball teams no longer will have to share the Klotsche Center with

“We just have to call coach and say we’re in there,” Freeman said. “I’m in there twice a day. I’m in there in the morning and I’m in there at night. I love it in there. It’s my quiet space. You don’t have to worry about other people; just worry about yourself. It’s awesome.”

The men’s team actually got to use the facility just before playing in the Discount Tire CBI Tournament in March.

“It was pure excitement,” Lundy said. “You get to the end of the year where you’ve practiced a lot. You’re on about 100 practices. We went in right before we went to the CBI Tournament and when they walked in there you could just see the practice energy was completely different.”

The Panthers were coming off a tough loss to Cleveland State in the Horizon League tournament, a game that was televised on

ESPN2. Lundy gathered his players around a brand-new white board and wrote on it for the first time.

“I told them, ‘Hey, we have to win one game in the CBI to get back on ESPN to redeem ourselves on national TV,’” he said. “I wrote ‘ESPN’ on the board and I said, ‘I really didn’t have much to tell you guys. I just wanted to open this board and write on it.’”

There were several obstacles to overcome along the way, including construction delays. The OHOW originally was scheduled to open in December 2022.

“I’m so thankful for Amanda’s resilience,” Rechlicz said of Braun. “There were so many bumps in the road but it never deterred her from finding a way. There would be a little bit of a roadblock and she’d get a ladder and climb over it or get a drill and go through the wall. I mean, she found ways to make it happen.”

Braun worked tirelessly on the project, shepherding it from start to finish, with Cathy Rossi, Milwaukee’s deputy director of athletics, serving as the liaison with the architects, contractor and sub-contractors. The building was designed by HGA Architects & Engineers.

Lundy was hired in March 2022, when construction on the OHOW Center was well underway. He said it was a factor in him accepting the job.

“All the credit goes to Amanda and her staff,” he said. “This was obviously a part of my calculation taking the job but when I got here, I tried to stay out of their way. I was just happy that I’m the one who gets to benefit from it.

In addition to giving the basketball players a place they can call home, the OHOW Center promises to be a persuasive piece in the recruitment of high-level student-athletes.

Wright State is the only other Horizon League school with a dedicated practice facility, but it’s more than a decade old.

“You do with what you’ve got, right?” Rechlicz said. “When you’re in the recruiting process, you sell what you have. For the longest time we’ve sold family and the culture that our program has and the UWM campus has and our athletic department has. That was our biggest selling point.

“Well, now we have that along with saying, ‘We also have this flashy new facility that you have access to, to be able to improve your game.’ It definitely takes recruits over the edge.”

Lundy said that college basketball programs at all levels are judged to some extent by their facilities. The bigger, better and flashier, the more likely recruits are to be impressed. But that’s not the beall, end-all for him.

“For me, the practical side of it maybe is more important — the film room, the access that our guys have,” he said. “They can go in a place where they can work to get better. To me, that’s everything. It’s kind of how we base the program, on work. Now we have a place to really work.”

A place to work. A place to grow. A place to thrive.

“We’re very lucky,” Rechlicz said. “It’s definitely an opportunity for us to take the next jump. I definitely think this is going to elevate us, for sure.”

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