Jerry Schmidt, Lacrosse All-america

April 23, 1962

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."

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."