Longtime staffer Marc VandeWettering is in a new role that helps the Badgers stay competitive in the evolving college basketball landscape.
As Wisconsin men’s basketball went through drills during a summer practice on July 24, perhaps one of the most important staff members in the gym was often far from the action.
Instead, he was sitting in a chair in the southeastern corner taking a phone call. That person was Marc VandeWettering — the longtime staffer who recently earned the promotion to a new general manager role that will be vital in the Badgers’ roster management and revenue sharing strategy.
“When I started in this program as a student manager back in 2011, I didn’t imagine that this is where I would end up,” VandeWettering told reporters after the practice. “Incredibly thankful and humbled by the opportunity. And credit to coach (Greg) Gard and the administration for having the foresight and making sure that we’re positioned well for the future.”
The new role for VandeWettering — officially announced earlier this month — was far from a surprise given Gard’s efforts to “stay either with or ahead of the times” in evolving reality of college basketball (that now includes schools directly compensating athletes.)
“We said over a year ago we’re going to need a general manager at some point in time,” Gard said. “It’s just a matter of how it all fit together.”
VanWettering has been on UW’s men’s basketball staff since 2017. He was the director of operations before adding the title of chief of staff for the 2023-24 and 2024-25 seasons. The Kaukauna native also was a student manager at UW and was the head manager during Wisconsin’s 2014 Final Four run.
“He has institutional knowledge that I think is really important here,” Gard said. “And then obviously the job that he has done over the last couple of years has been terrific. He’s really, really good in that administrative role.”
Wisconsin guard John Blackwell — among the standouts during Thursday’s practice, which was open to local media — said VandeWettering is “one of my favorite people on staff.”
“He’s a great guy, and I’m glad he got that position, that promotion to general manager, because he really deserves it,” Blackwell said. “He works day in, day out. You know you can hit Marc up at any time. He’s on it, and he’s always looking out for us.”
This is not an entirely new set of responsibilities for VanWettering after spending two seasons as the team’s chief of staff. But the general manager role means the operations aspect of his past job will go to a new hire.
“We were going to bury him under the Kohl Center if we kept piling stuff on his plate that we did,” Gard said. “There’s nobody that’s had more on his plate over the last 18 months than he has, so we needed to get some of that off his plate and really let him focus on the general manager and the front office, so to speak, quote-unquote, responsibilities of this.”
Now, VandeWettering has more time to forecast the Badgers’ roster — and the revenue sharing situation — for future offseason roster-building cycles. He used the hypothetical of if former Badger John Tonje had an extra year of eligibility and was deciding whether to pursue the NBA draft.
“OK, what does it look like if he comes back or doesn’t come back?” VandeWettering said. “Blackwell this year, same situation. Yeah, we had a good feeling that he was going to be back, but we’ll be able to model that out and be able to predict out what that looks like. OK, J.B. goes to the draft, what does that mean for the rest of the team, and how do we build out from there?”
Schools have been reluctant to divulge how much exactly is going to each team and each athlete on campus for competitive reasons, but the vast expectation is that football will receive most of the revenue sharing funds, with men’s basketball getting the next-biggest chunk. (The funding is capped at $20.5 million per school.)
Teams also do not necessarily accurately know what other teams are willing to pay for a particular athlete, aside from potentially inflated numbers from agents. VandeWettering is optimistic that data will eventually be available to give an idea of “what’s a starting point guard in the Big Ten worth.”
In the meantime, VandeWettering and the UW staff have some strategic decisions to make about how much to pay each player to build and retain a roster in the transfer portal era.
“As we’re building rosters, we’re trying to slot people in according to what we expect them to be on that team,” VandeWettering said. “Obviously we’re going to fill the roster accordingly. If we need a starting point guard, we’re going to have them slotted in a certain way.”
As VandeWettering works on roster construction, the Badgers are “still talking year-by-year.” But he aspires to eventually have more multi-year contracts with athletes to “get some more security.”
“We still pride ourselves on being a program of development,” VandeWettering said. “We want to make sure we stay true to that.”
VandeWettering also is “figuring things out on the fly a little bit” as he works in a new role on the men’s basketball staff amid a new era of athlete compensation, which officially began on July 1 after the House settlement’s final approval in June.
Other teams — both at Wisconsin and across the country — have similarly appointed general managers. UW football picked Marcus Sedberry, also the athletic department's deputy athletic director/chief operating officer, to be its football general manager.
“We’re bouncing ideas off each other a lot just on the different conversations we’re having,” VandeWettering said. “So we’re prepared for whatever things get thrown our way.”
Less than a month into VandeWettering’s new gig, the general manager title seems to already fit VandeWettering well.
“I don’t see him now that he’s actually front office,” Gard said in an obviously joking manner. “He’s hard to get a hold of. … Like he became one of them.”
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: How Wisconsin men's basketball GM Marc VandeWettering fills key role
Category: General Sports
