Beilue: Former WT coach Schneider earns Women’s Hall of Fame induction

Bob Schneider didn’t want to coach. He wanted to be a sportscaster.

To him, it was the best of both worlds. He played every sport at Darrouzett High School in the northeast Texas Panhandle, and then baseball and basketball at Oklahoma Panhandle State and Clarendon College, and was also greatly influenced by high school speech teacher Gladys Phillips.

So when he graduated from then-West Texas State University in 1958, he was ready to delve into the relatively new world of television and/or radio. Only one problem: There were no jobs available.

There was a coaching position, however, in his hometown. All that was required was head football coach, head boys and girls basketball coach, volleyball coach, start a track program for the boys — all of that with no assistant. Oh, and teach American history, world history, Texas history and government.

Schneider, with one brother Bill, grew up on a farm with parents Arthur and Rosie Schneider eight miles from Darrouzett. Hard work didn’t bother him. Going back to his hometown didn’t bother him either. He applied.

The Darrouzett school board hired him, but noted he didn’t have enough credits on his transcript to coach. He needed six hours, so he returned to WT that summer and took three hours in Gus Miller’s basketball coaching class and another three hours in Frank Kimbrough’s football coaching class.

“I guess it worked out,” Schneider said. “I coached for the next 48 years.”

Indeed, it did work out — both in quantity and quality. Schneider, 86, perhaps the godfather of girls/women’s basketball coaching in the Texas Panhandle, climbed a rare peak when he was inducted into the 2022 class of the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville, Tenn., on June 11.

He is the fifth coach with Texas Panhandle ties to enter the shrine, joining Harley Redin of Wayland Baptist University; Tulia native Marsha Sharp of Texas Tech University; Higgins’ Dean Weese of Spearman, Wayland Baptist and Levelland; and Joe Lombard of Nazareth and Canyon.

Schneider’s dominant decades were nearly all in Canyon. All but five of his years as a head coach were at Canyon High School, where he won 350 games and five state championships, and at West Texas A&M University, where he won 585 games and nine conference titles.

“I’d rank Bob and Dean Weese as the two top guys and maybe the ones most responsible for putting girls basketball on the map in the Panhandle,” Lombard said. “I know there have been a few before them, but in my lifetime, it was Bob Schneider and Dean Weese.

“With Bob, it was just not in West Texas. Since he coached at WT, he was well known nationally too. He was a great mentor for me.”

Would you like to coach the girls?

After one year of doing it all at Darrouzett, he followed Roy Pennington to Clayton, N.M. – “a little more money and not as much work,” Schneider said. After four years there, he returned to the Texas Panhandle as assistant football and track coach in McLean.

His career arc would change forever the next year when the head girls basketball coach retired, and the principal asked if Schneider would step in. Recalling how much he liked his brief time of coaching girls at Darrouzett, Schneider responded: “I sure would.”

After his second year at McLean, Schneider and a coaching friend spent the summer at Canyon to work on their master’s degrees at WT. Canyon Junior High was going to reinstate girls basketball, and Schneider was approached to gauge his interest in coaching the girls and teaching health.

He became a full-time resident of Canyon, but he never got to coach the junior highs, at least not exclusively. One evening there was a note on his apartment door. He was asked to speak with the Canyon High School principal the next day.

“I was told the high school girls coach was leaving, and that Jack Riley at McLean had some favorable things to say about me,” Schneider said. “I was asked if I wanted to coach the high school girls, and I told them, ‘Yes, I’d love to.’”

This was 1966-67 school year. Schneider didn’t inherit a cozy situation. Just the previous year there had been some discussion to drop girls basketball. But there was an about-face thanks to new superintendent Jerry Jacobs, who wanted all coaches to emphasize participation and numbers.

In short time, Schneider had two teams in seventh, eighth and ninth grade. He had a sophomore, junior varsity and varsity team. There were so many players that those who did not play during the week came to the gym on Saturday mornings for intrasquad games.

Talent was mined out of those numbers, and then Schneider did the rest. He was able to motivate an already hungry group of girls. He hammered them on fundamentals and work ethic in the six-on-six game. By his third year, Schneider had Canyon in the Class 3A girls state tournament in Austin. At the time, it was the state’s highest classification for girls basketball.

“All these coaches who had been real successful told me that when you go to state for the first time, don’t say you’re going to win it,” Schneider said. “You don’t know what you’re getting into.”

But Canyon won its first girls Class 3A state title in Schneider’s first trip to state, 59-42, over Angleton. It would be the beginning of 10 consecutive trips to the state tournament. The Eaglettes would also win championships in 1972, 1974, 1977 and 1978. The other five trips they were state runners-up. It was the first extended girls basketball dynasty in the Panhandle.

“We really played up that first one,” Schneider said. “We came back from the state tournament and I showed off that silver ball and all the trophies we won to get to state to our seventh-grade teams on up, and tried to motivate those girls as to what we had experienced and maybe they could experience.”

In 1976-78, Canyon was powered by sisters Robena and Merry Johnson. In Schneider’s last three years, the Eaglettes were 103-2, perhaps the most dominant three years in the area’s history. The 1978 team, his last one, was 36-0 and defeated Corpus Christi Tuloso-Midway, 59-37, for the title.

The girls game was moving to the five-player format after that year. Maybe it was time to make a move, Schneider believed. Maybe it was time to try the college game. Texas Woman’s University was starting basketball, and Burt Lyles, the athletic director, was a good friend.

He persuaded Schneider to leave for TWU with assurances that quality facilities and an expanded budget were coming. It never happened, and after three disappointing seasons, Schneider was ready to leave.

The WT program was still in its infancy as a competitive scholarship program. After an 8-14 season in 1980-81, coach Gary Mooring resigned. Schneider called athletic director Myron Dees about the opening. He would have to take a $10,000 pay cut, but he didn’t care.

It was home. Schneider and wife Barbra had a young family. It was a chance to build the WT program and really prove himself at the collegiate level. New Mexico State made an offer about the same time Dees made one.

“Thanks, but no thanks,” he told them.

Sustained excellence for quarter-century

For the next 25 seasons, Schneider set a bar of excellence that is unprecedented in WT athletics. After the two years of adjustment when the Lady Buffs still won 17 and 15 games, the program took off especially when entering NCAA Division II’s Lone Star Conference in 1986-87.

In the last two years of Division I, playing in the short-lived Oil Country Conference, WT was 52-11. That set the table for dominance in Division II. In 1988, the Lady Buffs were 33-0 and played for the national title before losing to Hampton in the finals.

Angela Land played for Schneider from 1984-1988. As Angela Seay, she came from tiny Byers near Wichita Falls. In her senior year, she was the starting point guard on the team that was national runner-up.

“I would have to say that I worked harder during those four years of my life than any four in my entire life,” said Land, formerly a coach at Canyon and now at Argyle. “To me, it wasn’t so much that Coach Schneider was demanding, but that he had high expectations.

“He expected my best every time I stepped on the floor, not just in a game, but in practice, and also in the classroom. He just really had high expectations for us as players.”

Schneider’s teams won 30 or more games three times, 25 or more 10 times, and 20 or more 16 times. He won nine conference titles, eight of them in the LSC with three Elite Eight appearances. The WT Fieldhouse, otherwise known as “The Box,” was a house of doom for opponents. The Lady Buffs ran up a home winning streak at one point that approached 100.

Schneider had a tried-and-true formula. First, his recruiting base was from Lubbock to the north in the high schools and junior college. Six of his players were first-team All-Americas. Four were from the Panhandle – Vanessa Wells (Palo Duro), Teresa Tinner (Tulia), Natasha Taylor (Childress). Emily Brister (Amarillo High) was a freshman in Schneider’s last year in 2006, but would be a three-time All-America.

Secondly, he preached pressure-man defense, a variety of full-court presses, a post-oriented offense, basic fundamentals, and preparedness. Practices would reflect that in their intensity and attention to detail.

“People would laugh at our practices because it was like we were in summer camp lines going through fundamentals,” Land said. “It was ball-handling drills, shooting the ball correctly, make the high-percentage shot, take care of the ball on every possession.

“I think of Coach Schneider like I think of John Wooden when you are properly prepared you can rise to your highest level to achieve competitive greatness.”

Schneider’s record at WT was 585-163. His 350 wins at Canyon accounted for 945 of his 1,045 wins against only 293 losses.

His oldest son Brandon is head women’s coach at the University of Kansas. Younger son Brett was an assistant with his dad at WT among several of his coaching stops. Daughter Brooke played for the Lady Buffs in 1999-2000.

In fact, Schneider’s last of 1,338 games was against Brandon when he was coach at Emporia State in Kansas. They met in the South Central regional semifinals where son got the best of his father, 88-82, on March 11, 2006.

Fifteen years went by before Schneider, who had been close before, was notified that he would be one of eight in the Class of 2022, the 23rd class for induction. With Schneider in Knoxville were Barbra, their three children, two grandchildren, and four close friends.

“I couldn’t believe it, to be honest,” Schneider said. “When I was told I was in, I just sat there for a little while not believing what was happening. I said, ‘Could you please repeat that?’

“Then you find out it’s real, and you get all this information and make all these plans, and it was just surreal. It was just a humbling and awesome experience.”

It was probably for the best there were no radio or TV jobs open 64 years ago. The basketball coaching profession and a certain coach would have been a lot poorer for it.

Editor's note: This column originally appeared on the WT website.

Do you know of a student, faculty member, project, an alumnus or any other story idea for “WT: The Heart and Soul of the Texas Panhandle?” If so, email Jon Mark Beilue at jbeilue@wtamu.edu .

This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: Beilue: Reaching the basketball pinnacle