On a busy Thursday morning, Marc VandeWettering took some time to shed light on his evolution to general manager of the University of Wisconsin men’s basketball program.
Busy has been the operative word for VandeWettering, who said, “There’s a lot going on right now and I’m just trying to get these last few moving pieces through the finish line.”
All in all, it has been an ongoing process for the 33-year-old VandeWettering, who has been the chief of staff the past two seasons and the director of operations since 2017.
“I feel like it started back in 2021 when NIL (name, image, likeness) first was adopted by the NCAA,” he said of his GM learning curve, “and it’s just grown from there.”
Since the start of July, it has grown even more so with the U.S. House v. NCAA settlement — altering how college athletes can be compensated — and the advent of revenue sharing.
“It has been a steady evolution,” said VandeWettering, a 2015 UW graduate in business management and a native of Kaukauna. “The more that it has grown, the more that it has become a responsibility in of itself.
“Give credit to coach (Greg) Gard and the administration for having the foresight on where this is going and knowing this needs to be the primary focus for somebody to make sure we’re on top of things, staying current and being as forward facing as we can be.”
VandeWettering will work closely with Gard and his assistants on developing and implementing a recruiting strategy for high school prospects and the transfer portal. He will also be involved in contract negotiations with agents as revenue sharing plays out.
A necessary program objective within the new college landscape was “to make sure that we were positioned well for the future,” he said, in knowing there are still questions to be answered and “we’re all just figuring this out on the fly across the industry.”
In sum, he added, “I will still continue to have my hands in a lot of different areas within the program and be able to have some oversight of some spaces specifically with our roster building and roster construction from year to year.”
Budgeting his time as a GM has become more critical than ever.
“Truthfully that has been the biggest hurdle,” he conceded.
General managers have been growing in popularity. Long a staple of professional sports, they now have become invaluable to college head coaches seeking to maximize their resources and personnel in handling recruiting, NIL and diverse other assignments.
“We saw it coming,” Gard said. “We tried to stay either with or ahead of the times. He (VandeWettering) has done a phenomenal job. Obviously in this world of roster composition and acquisition and building a team, he has been right there with us.
“I felt we said over a year ago that we were going to need a general manager at some point and time. It’s just a matter of how it all fit together and his knowledge of this place — he has this institutional knowledge — I think is really important here.”
One of the first college basketball GMs was Rachel Baker, who took over the position for the Duke University men’s team in 2022. Baker worked eight years at Nike and had experience with the NBA and WNBA in marketing and branding.
Michigan’s Kyle Church and DePaul’s Lavall Jordan are among examples of assistant coaches who also serve as general managers for their respective programs.
“There’s somebody doing this work at all 18 schools in the Big Ten, whether or not they’ve got the title,” VandeWettering said.
Related: Wisconsin basketball’s ‘de facto’ GM coordinates LA trip
‘A professional sports model’
This has been a transformative moment for college athletics.
“The biggest thing with that is him being able to operate months ahead to where we are in real time,” Gard said. “Where we are now in July, he’s already forecasting in terms of retention on how do we build a roster for 2026-27?
“We’ve had to spin a lot of new plates that have been involved with the revenue share and how this is all going to work with the House settlement and the clearinghouse and everything going forward.
“It really has become a professional sports model in terms of agent relations, conversations with agents, developing relationships and understanding which agents have what players, not only from a high school standpoint but internationally.”
Wisconsin Badgers head coach Greg Gard said of the team’s newly elevated general manager: “He (Marc VandeWettering) has done a phenomenal job. Obviously in this world of roster composition and acquisition and building a team, he has been right there with us.”
JOHN HART / WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL
The Badgers have expanded recruiting to Europe thanks in large part to the background of assistant coaches Kirk Penney and Lance Randall and associate head coach Joe Krabbenhoft. All have competed or coached overseas at one time or another.
“It has been an incredible diversification of the staff through the experience and the connections they have,” VandeWettering said. “Everybody is usually just a phone call away from somebody. Credit to coach again for having the foresight where the game is trending.
“With the House settlement and revenue sharing and roster caps and things, it all looks different now than it has for the past 20, 30 or 40 years. But we’ll continue to evolve and continue to find our place within that.”
On the direction of Wisconsin’s recruiting, VandeWettering said, “We’ve had some tremendous success with transfers and high school recruits. We’re going to continue to be active in both spaces. We’re never going to go full one way or the other.”
Instead, it will be a blend of all the different areas that are available to construct and shape a roster. In general, VandeWettering observed, “We’re excited about the way things have gone for us and we’re looking to build on that momentum.”
Throughout this transition, Gard has been conscious of the many hats that VandeWettering has been wearing. But he’s intent on lightening VandeWettering’s workload.
“There’s nobody who’s had more on his plate over the last 18 months than he did,” Gard said. “So we needed to get some of that off his plate and let him focus on general manager and the front office, so to speak, responsibilities.”
While Gard is planning on hiring someone to take over some of the operations duties, VandeWettering will still be in charge of the nonconference scheduling.
Badgers to start in Milwaukee
The NCAA has made some changes to its scheduling guidelines. Teams are allowed to play two preseason exhibition games against any program. Schools can choose how to allocate the money from these exhibitions, once subject to a waiver process.
In their first exhibition (Oct. 24), the Badgers will face Oklahoma at Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum. Their second exhibition will be against UW-Platteville (Oct. 29) at the Kohl Center, renewing a commitment to the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference.
Wisconsin will return to the Fiserv Forum for a Dec. 19 nonconference game against Villanova, one of two regular season matchups in NBA arenas. The other will be against BYU (Nov. 21) at the Delta Center, the home of the Utah Jazz in Salt Lake City.
Neutral site games are part of a developing NCAA trend.
Gard is embracing the Milwaukee trips.
“Obviously the level of competition is important,” Gard said. “And then there’s a financial component, too, that this world has changed in terms of how we have to continue to navigate and develop new resources, new sources of financial stability.
“All those things come into that, and I wanted to leave no rock unturned, so to speak, on what the opportunities were for us and what the options were. We had a lot of them on the table and to play two (games) in Milwaukee is as good as it gets.”
During his post-practice debriefing, Gard continued to laud VandeWettering and his expanded role in the newly created GM position. At one point, he feigned looking over his shoulder as if inquiring to VandeWettering’s whereabouts. Per usual, he was laboring behind the scenes.
“I don’t see him now,” he said, grinning. “He’s hard to get a hold of.”
On a busy Thursday morning, Marc VandeWettering was busier than ever.
And loving every second.