From walk-on to redshirt to role player to sixth-man, Jack Janicki has had a remarkable 12 months in Madison. Once overlooked on the Wisconsin basketball depth chart, Janicki has emerged as a vital component in the Wisconsin Badgers machine, a testament to his resilience and determination.
With only a year of playing time under his belt, UW head coach Greg Gard already sees Janicki among the players who make up “your core, your foundation, the culture of your program.” Gard relies on players like Janicki “to be able to pass the ‘hows’ and the ‘whys’ on before the coaches have to” address that with the new roster additions.
Janicki joined Badger Breakaway for this one-on-one interview. Premium subscribers get access to the full audio interview, which includes Janicki working through his happy crisis of not knowing whether his roommate, John Blackwell, is headed to the NBA Draft.
If you have not already upgraded your subscription, get a Janicki-themed discount. He swapped to jersey #5, but we’re giving you the classic #33 Janicki discount!
That’s $33 off your first year, meaning you get:
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But act fast, this discount goes away after the Wisconsin Badgers take on UW-Platteville in an exhibition matchup this Wednesday.
Correcting season-ending cold streak is Janicki’s top priority
After Janicki spent a year on the bench to develop, Gard thrust his redshirt freshman into a critical role in the rotation. Coming off the bench to give Wisconsin’s veteran guards a rest, Janicki played double-digit minutes in eight of UW’s last nine regular-season conference games. Playing in a reserve role behind Max Klesmit, John Blackwell, and All-American John Tonje, Janicki averaged 1.9 points, 1.4 rebounds, and 0.8 assists in 11.4 minutes per game, but Janicki knows he can take another step.
“It’s all about improving on the role you had last year, right? So, mindset doesn’t really change.” Janicki said in a pre-season interview. “It’s still constant Improvement and chasing growth, but people’s express expectations might have changed. But that’s, that’s external. I’d say the process has been pretty similar.”
The White Bear Lake, Minnesota native profiles as a 3-and-D type of player, but has plenty of room to grow in that role. Janicki made only 13 of his 47 attempts from three last season, finishing with a team-low 27.7% from beyond the arc. He ended the season on a cold streak, failing to make a three-pointer in March, missing his last 11 attempts of the year. Janicki’s inability to hit his shots pushed him to the fringe of the rotation, as his minutes played in Wisconsin’s final three games were his fewest in months. Before that, he had made 36.1% of his threes, a glimmer of his potential.
Making sure that kind of off-stretch of shooting does not happen again, especially now that Janicki better understands his role, has been a significant point of emphasis this offseason.
“I’m focusing on, you know, my jump shot and where I can be more aggressive. Now that I have a better feel for for what’s needed in me,” the former walk-on said. “And yeah, I’m excited.”
Although Janicki says his coaches “probably have like 20 things” for him to improve after his initial breakout season, shooting was his top priority headed into his redshirt sophomore campaign.
“What I went in trying to improve on was definitely my shot, and the consistency of my mechanics simplifying it,” Janicki said. “And you know, although KP isn’t here anymore, he was. We spent a lot of time together in the summer and that that should be evident in in the winter.”
Janicki got back on the horse in the exhibition against the Oklahoma Sooners, making his first shot of the contest: a three-pointer to prevent OU from going up double-digits in the second half.
Janicki does ‘little things that impact winning’
As a player who had to first get on campus and then earn his scholarship, Janicki has long understood the importance of what might go unnoticed to the general public. Although he is now more concerned with making sure he drains a few buckets, he is not far removed from relishing the role of “come in and just do the little things that contribute to winning,” even if “points don’t always follow that.”
A re-upped deal to return to Wisconsin basketball has not changed Janicki’s primary focus, which remains on the team rather than his individual statistical output. The 6-foot-5, 200-pound guard proudly continues to hone his “ability to like, do little things on the defensive end. Like, get over a ball screen better, guard without fouling, little things like that, that don’t show up as much on the stat sheet or even on Twitter, but like, so important to the outcome of a game.”
That work ethic is why Janicki spurned a handful of scholarship offers to pursue a chance of playing in the Big Ten. It led him, in an era of college basketball defined by the transfer portal, to stay put at UW after redshirting even though Gard added three guards between Janicki’s redshirt and freshman year.
Despite the addition of Tonje, the highest-rated point guard recruit in program history in Daniel Freitag, and veteran All-ASUN talent Cam Hunter, Janicki bet on his ability to impact the game beyond the box score.
Those impact plays—the connective tissue of a basketball roster—make Janicki an integral piece of Gard’s Wisconsin Badgers. His willingness to defend, his understanding that “ball screens are everything in basketball now,” and his knowledge of Gard’s culture have made Janicki invaluable.
Because of what he did last year, Janicki no longer has to worry about being on the outside looking in, as Wisconsin added another talented class of transfer portal guards, including Nick Boyd and Andrew Rohde. In fact, Janicki is counted on to get those newcomers up to speed.
“[Janicki] does a lot of little things that maybe don’t [show up].” Gard said after a summer practice. “We’ve had so many of those guys over the years, you know, [Josh] Gasser or [Zak] Showalter, that have done little things that impact winning, that are really, really important. And Jack’s another one of those guys that has those types of traits, that just understands what it takes to win, and he’s willing to do that for his team.”
Much like Showalter, Janicki worked his way from being a walk-on into a cornerstone role, doing all those “little things” well enough to be held up alongside great players of the Gard-Ryan era.
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