Coaching carousel, and mumps outbreak

(Continued from last week.)

After the 1994-95 basketball season ended, the Hillsboro school board declined to renew the (coaching) contract of Coach Thom Snyder and selected assistant coach Pat Stevens to take over the reins.

Thom Snyder played basketball for me when I was coach at Whiteoak. I had been at McClain for five years and was very content there. Who wouldn’t be content at McClain?

But the Bright Local superintendent called me and basically offered me two jobs. Since the pay schedule at Bright Local was far below the Greenfield schedule, I would take a very large pay cut going from McClain to Whiteoak as basketball coach. But he wanted me to also be high school principal. So, in effect, I would hold two full-time jobs, which would get my pay rate up to a little more than I would get at Greenfield. I took the job.

I looked forward to being principal about the same way most people look forward to a root canal, but some people will do nearly anything for money!

The basketball team at Whiteoak had won exactly two games the previous season, and I had essentially the same boys back. They were very nice kids, and they really wanted to win. 

Thom Snyder came from a family of outstanding athletes. He had a football build. He was big and very strong, and though not blessed with blazing speed, he was not slow for a young man who was as big as he was. He could hold his own rebounding with almost anybody.

We also had Jim Schroeder, Jeff Harvey, Nolan Walker, Ronnie Eyre, Kenny Taylor, Dennis Overstake, Sam Scott, Rick Emery and several other young men with various levels of skill and commitment who came in ready to go to work.

We concentrated on defense, and I really thought we were the best, or one of the best defensive teams in the Southern Hills League.

We won a lot of games that season. Nobody, even the best teams in the conference, could take us for granted. We didn’t have much height. If we had had a 6’ 5” kid who could play a little, we would have been in the thick of the battle for the league title. I have always believed that.

Additionally, we suffered through an epidemic of mumps, right in the middle of the basketball season. We played nine games that season in which we had at least one starter out. In three games, we had two or more starters out. While we had some good kids on the bench, we didn’t have that kind of depth. We lost at least four games that I felt we would probably have won, had we been at anything like full strength.

Even I had the mumps. Try having a good case of mumps when you are 40 years old. That was a memorable experience! I missed three games, and I think we could have won two of them. But this was a great group of kids, and many of them are still friends today, and that was almost 40 years ago.

Back to Thom Snyder. He was a great kid to coach. He wanted to win, and he was willing to do whatever he had to do to win. He worked very hard (as all the boys did), and I never had any problem whatsoever with him. I pushed him to go to college. The Snyders were farmers. Good farmers. I told Thom he could still be a farmer with a college education. I don’t think education ever hurt anybody.

Eventually, Thom did start to think about getting a college education. I have always believed that one of a coach’s responsibilities is providing guidance to help kids find the course of action that just might make their lives a little better. Thom has told me since that the thought of getting a college education had never before entered his mind. But now, as he is at the threshold of retirement, my guess is that he is not sorry that he chose that course.

When he went to college, and they put out the call for candidates for the football team, Thom went out. He had, of course, never played a game of high school football in his life. But he was a big, strong, rugged kid, and was intelligent and very coachable. He made the team. He was put on scholarship.

His dad once told me, “Thom went to college four years and got a degree, and it cost me a grand total of $42 (a non-refundable application fee).”

After getting his college degree, he coached several years at the College of Wooster and Kent State University, and a hitch in the Wilmington City Schools, before taking the Hillsboro job. Had he asked my advice, I would have urged him to stay away from the Hillsboro job. When you look back over the past 40 years, Hillsboro has had only one basketball coach who stayed more than three years.

(Continued next week.)

Bob Patton is a Highland County sports historian and a contributing writer to The Highland County Press.