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Catching Up With . . .
Jerry Schmidt, Lacrosse
All-America
April 23,
1962
Posted: Tue March 24, 1998
At Johns Hopkins from 1959 to '62, Jerry Schmidt was
lacrosse's dominating force, the forerunner of the physical
attackman. He was
5'10" and 190 pounds, fast and tough and mean. Schmidt
was willing to put a shoulder down and turn the competition
into roadkill, much to the shock of defensemen used to
facing smaller forwards. Thirty-six years later he remains
the only lacrosse player
to have appeared on SI's
cover.
Schmidt never played on artificial turf, never wore a
streamlined helmet and never had formal weight training the
way college players do now. In fact, he even missed Johns
Hopkins's heyday. During his three
All-America seasons with the Blue Jays, in
which he scored 93 goals, he failed to win an NCAA title,
though his charismatic play did help establish the
foundation for a program that would go on to win 11
national championships and produce 229 more
All-Americas. "The game was different then," says
Schmidt, 58, who grew up in Baltimore. "Today the
sticks are synthetic and totally symmetrical, so players
are much more ambidextrous. In my day the sticks were wood,
carved by Indians and strung with leather. The ball would
come off them different ways
from each side. You never really knew how it would
fly."
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Following his collegiate career, Schmidt made the leap into
coaching. He guided
Division III Hobart for 11 seasons, leading the Statesmen to
three national championships and building what is now a
lacrosse dynasty. In 1978 he quit to help operate a
sporting goods business in Jacksonville, N.C., but was bitten
by the coaching bug again, first serving as an assistant at
Navy and then taking over at Princeton. Schmidt went 27-58
with the Tigers from 1982 to '87 before resigning, then
headed up programs
at Madison
(N.J.) High and at Worcester Country School, which was near his
home in Ocean Pines, Md. Troubled by poor circulation in
his legs, he quit coaching for good in
1994.
These days, Schmidt spends much of his time crabbing off
Maryland's Eastern Shore. He is married to Olga, his second
wife, and has six children and nine grandchildren. The
SI cover hangs in his study, alongside a plaque commemorating
his 1982
induction
into the Johns Hopkins Hall of Fame. "The game has
given me a lot of high moments," he says. "I
dedicated my life to playing, coaching and teaching, and
that took a lot of time. But I look at what I have, what
I've done, and it was all worth
it.
—by Jeff Pearlman
Cover photograph by Jerry Cooke
photo on left by Scott Brown
Issue date: March 30, 1998
Past Editions of Catching Up With...
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