Kevin Morales / Daily Register
Pardeeville native and Wisconsin offensive line coach Bob Bostad, right, coaches one of the UW offensive linemen during a spring practice. Bostad and the Badgers are getting ready for their Aug. 30th opener against Akron.

MADISON - To Bob Bostad, water breaks are like 100-pound offensive linemen.

He has no use for them.

So when the special teams portion of practice arrives and most of the University of Wisconsin football team heads over to a tent on the sidelines to seek shade and cool air while they drink water and catch a breather, the offensive linemen instead follow Bostad, their position coach, to the north end of the stadium for some more drills under the hot sun.

"That's just his coaching style," said sophomore left tackle Gabe Carimi. "He loves having reps, and it's great because all the stuff we do is no-nonsense. We try to work harder than any other group. That's just coach Bostad's mentality, which is awesome."

It's not that Bostad, a Pardeeville native, who spent the last two seasons as the Badgers' tight end coach before taking over the offensive line when Bob Palcic left for UCLA this past offseason, wants to punish his players. He just wants to maximize every last second of practice.

"We've only got two hours to practice," Bostad said, "and you're going to sit around for 10 minutes, and do what - look around at each other?"

Bostad may have gotten some strange looks in the spring when the offensive linemen began to see how much of a drill sergeant he was. Now, by all accounts, they're hungry - or thirsty, if you will - to be pushed to the limit.

"Water breaks, whatever, we're here to work," said fifth-year senior right guard Kraig Urbik, the elder statesman of an experienced starting group. "We're not here to sit down and drink some water. We get plenty of water between plays."

It helps that Bostad inherited a veteran group that continually strives to improve. Urbik leads the way with 39 career starts; right tackle Eric Vanden Heuvel and left guard Andy Kemp, both seniors, have 23 starts apiece; Carimi started all 13 games at left tackle as a freshman; and sophomore center John Moffitt had six starts at left guard in 2007.

"I'm really pleased with their work ethic," Bostad said. "Nobody's had a problem putting in the time. No one ever scoffs or complains, and I never got any negative (feedback). They're more than willing to put in the work.

"It doesn't take a genius to figure out that you're returning a lot of experience, and that helps. It's a real good situation that way. Can we get a lot better? Yeah, I think we can get better. There's a lot of things to improve upon."

The three seniors are playing for their third position coach in four seasons, although they're familiar with Bostad because he assisted Palcic at times the last two seasons. If they didn't know it already, they quickly found out that Bostad is a stickler for details who doesn't excuse bad fundamentals and mental mistakes.

"It's a lot more technique and lot more fundamentals," Vanden Heuvel said. "I think he's doing a lot more teaching and he's being a lot more insistent on certain techniques, which is definitely helping us."

This group resembles a typical hard-working UW offensive line from the past in that they like to work hard and do the dirty work despite getting little, if any, attention.

That said, if someone wanted to call UW's offensive line the hardest-working position group on the team, Bostad's charges would be just fine with that.

"It'd be welcome, for sure," Urbik said. "If anything, it deserves for coach Bostad. He has instilled a hard-working mentality and a mindset that we have to come every day and work as hard as we can, and absolutely play smashmouth football every single play. I think we're starting to get that. We're playing a lot harder."