Jerry Sullivan, a native of Ashland, WI, was a pioneer for youth camps in the state. (Getty Images)

The journey began in 1966, when several enterprising young coaches opened the doors to a basketball camp in the North Shore region of suburban Milwaukee.

Blomberg, a native of Prentice, Wis., had built a widely respected coaching reputation at Peshtigo (Wis.) High School and later became Brookfield Central High School’s original boys basketball coach. His fellow pioneers included Tom Hawley of Muskego High School and Jack Nagle of Whitefish Bay High School. They got together and sought out a partner.

The man they found was Sullivan, a native of Ashland, Wis., and a graduate of Northland College. He had cut his coaching teeth at Tomahawk (Wis.) High School before taking over the boys basketball helm at South Milwaukee High School in 1961.

“Up to that time, summer camps were not allowed in Wisconsin,” Sullivan said. “Ron and his colleagues felt they needed another young coach, and I had the good fortune to still be in their mind from a tournament meeting we had and they called me.

“It was the beginning of a wonderful relationship and one of the most important happenings in my coaching career and my life. Ron Blomberg and Tom Hawley and myself became like brothers.”

Over the four-plus decades that followed, the eventual Wisconsin Basketball Coaches Association Hall-of-Famers logged countless miles barnstorming the Great Plains and the Grain Belt, venturing to such outposts as Ottawa, Kansas … Chadron, Nebraska … Orange City, Iowa … Galesburg, Illinois … Crawfordsville, Indiana … and cities all across their home state of Wisconsin.

The Capitol Basketball School began as an eight-hour day camp offering sessions over a 10-week span. When that camp debuted, the Milwaukee Bucks were nothing but a pipe dream.

Blomberg left the program a year later to become athletic director and head basketball coach at Beaver Dam's Wayland Academy. There, in 1968, he and Wayland headmaster Ray Patterson introduced one of the state's first residential basketball camps, the All-American Sports Camp.

During the ensuing two years, the camp staff featured some of the most prominent figures in the coaching world. When they began, the Milwaukee Bucks were nothing but a pipe dream.

At about the same time, Milwaukee was awarded a National Basketball Association franchise, and Patterson was appointed team president. Patterson enlisted Blomberg and Charles Cape to form a corporation that gave birth to the Milwaukee Bucks Basketball Camps.

“Ray Patterson wanted to establish a base of future – and later on current – fans for the Bucks,” Sullivan explained. “He wanted to get young kids to come to the camps and go home and say, ‘Mom, Dad, I want to go to some Bucks games!’”

With the Bucks’ backing, the camp program expanded from two sites to 18 and extended beyond Wisconsin and Iowa into North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan. Blomberg was the full-time director from Day One, and Sullivan came aboard in an administrative capacity in 1971 and became associate director.

In Sullivan’s estimation, Patterson could not have hand-picked a better camp administrator than Ron Blomberg.

“Ron’s greatest strength was he visualized the idea Ray Patterson had about having a camp for grade school boys and girls,” Sullivan said. “He started the University School camps earlier, and later on did the same thing at Wayland Academy in Beaver Dam. He asked Ron and his wife, LaVerne, to travel the Midwest to small colleges across the Midwest to sit down with the coaching staffs and put the camp concepts together.

“He began the whole idea of using high school and junior high school kids as camp instructors, with college coaches as the headliners, working with younger kids. Ron oversaw the staff. He was the administrator. He was tremendously organized right down to the last detail.”

Blomberg and Sullivan recruited an unparalleled staff of coaches.

“Ron surrounded himself with quality coaches and had a great personality to work with all of them,” Sullivan said. “He had John Wooden, Adolph Rupp, Al McGuire, George King from Purdue, Harvey Schmidt from Illinois… they were all very interested in the camp concept. Ron was a master, a great organizer and a great guy. The coaches who worked the camps always went the extra mile for him.”

As time went by and the Bucks were born, their coaches and players were eager to become involved in the camps, too. Their appearances were a big treat for the youngsters, for the coaches and players themsevles, and for the directors. The camps predictably soared in popularity. Blomberg figures that during his and Sullivan’s years as directors, the camps served between 70 and 72 thousand campers and featured over 500 different coaches.

“As time went by, Ron got Larry Costello (the Bucks’ original coach), Tom Nissalke (Costello’s first assistant), Hubie Brown (Costello’s second assistant) and the Bucks players involved,” Sullivan said.

As the camps were thriving, Blomberg developed into a television star, too. Renowned as both a great student and teacher of the game of basketball, he became the first analyst on Bucks telecasts, working alongside electrifying play-by-play man Eddie Doucette, who had already become a local legend.

“Eddie Doucette had his colorful, exciting style of calling the game, with all of his nicknames for the players and for basketball terminology, and Ron became known as ‘The Professor’ for the way he broke the game down,” Sullivan said. “They really became a great duo.”

Blomberg’s trademark became his magnetic board, a basketball court layout on which he maneuvered the magnets as offensive and defensive players to illustrate game strategy at hafltime.

“Ron was so articulate and organized, and thought using the board on television would be a great teaching tool,” Sullivan said. “He loved breaking down the game, and he knew there would be an interest in that.”

While Costello was helping out with the Bucks camps, he developed a great admiration of Blomberg, his basketball expertise and his administrative skills. Costello and Bucks management thought so highly of Blomberg that they enlisted him to do some moonlighting that would directly benefit the Milwaukee Bucks.

Learn more about Blomberg's venture in "Keeping The Camp Fires Burning ... Part II"