Schneider takes over as Kansas women’s basketball coach

By Tom Keegan     Apr 21, 2015

Mike Yoder
Brandon Schneider addresses reporters during his introduction Tuesday, April 21 as the new head coach of the KU women's basketball team.

New Kansas University women’s basketball coach Brandon Schneider didn’t have to look outside of his family to fully appreciate where the program he has taken over stands on the school’s hoops pecking order.

At his introductory news conference on Tuesday morning, Schneider shared a story of sitting down with his sons, Cash, 5, and Cole, 3, Monday night to break the news to them.

“I said, ‘You know, Daddy’s going to coach a new team,'” Schneider related. “They said, ‘Who?’ I said, ‘The Kansas Jayhawks.'”

Then Schneider impersonated his son by speeding up his voice to lend it urgency when he shared Cole’s next question: “Boys or girls?”

Genuine laughter — not the kind sometimes manufactured at news conferences by reporters seeking to curry favor with a coach — filled the room at the news conference attended by Cash, Cole, their mother, Ali, her parents and the new coach’s parents.

Schneider’s response to his excited son: “The girls, man.”

That might have softened the thrill for the young boy, but it didn’t take any of the dream out of the job for his father.

“I’m a basketball junkie,” KU’s new women’s basketball coach said. “I’ve never gotten a paycheck that was not related to basketball. Working basketball camps, doing skill-work clinics. I did get a paycheck from Paramount Studios one time, but I was a basketball extra. When you are a basketball junkie, there is no other place you want to be.”

Schneider’s move landed him a five-year contract with an annual salary of $300,000, plus incentives based on Big 12 regular-season success. Nobody needed to ask him to name the biggest coaching influence in his career. His father, Bob, coached high school and Division II women’s basketball for 43 years.

“I am coach Brandon, I’m not coach Schneider,” the new coach said, looking in his father’s direction. “That is coach Schneider. He’s the only coach Schneider in the family. … My mother, Barbara, is here. You will not meet anyone who can criticize and berate officials with the ferociousness that she can.”

Schneider, 43, who won back-to-back regular-season Southland Conference crowns at Stephen F. Austin, is not naive to the challenge that awaits him. His predecessor, Bonnie Henrickson, came to Kansas from Virginia Tech with a winning background. In 11 seasons, Henrickson’s teams made the NCAA Tournament field twice, in consecutive seasons, but never posted a winning record in Big 12 play.

“You’re playing in the Big 12 Conference,” he said of the biggest challenge to the job. “You are now recruiting against, affectionately, fire-breathing dragons. So the intensity of everything that we do, particularly in recruiting, obviously goes way up. I understand the challenge. You sit there in the league, OK, you want to move up. Who are you jumping?

“Tremendous coaches. Nationally renowned. Pros, you’re playing against pros every night.”

Still, he said, he never doubted that pursuing and accepting the job was the right move.

“It’s a situation where I love competition,” Schneider said. “I want to coach against the best. I want to recruit players who want to play against the best. Couldn’t be a better environment for that than Kansas.”

Schneider didn’t make any promises about how many games Kansas will win under him. He did make promises regarding the effort his players will put forth.

Such as:

“We are going to play extremely hard. We’re going to be the team that’s jumping over the scorer’s table, diving on the floor for loose balls, rotating to take charges.”

And: “We’re going to exude toughness, mentally and physically. Mentally, we have to be tough enough to move on to the next play. Whether the play was negative or whether the play was a potential top-10 highlight on ‘SportsCenter.’ You have to be tough enough to move on to the next play.”

He also vowed that, “We will be the most conditioned team on the court. We have control of that, as a coaching staff, as a strength-and-conditioning staff. No one will be in better physical condition than the Kansas Jayhawks.”

He also stressed sound fundamentals and becoming a team that “promotes unity and communication.”

Schneider developed extensive Kansas recruiting ties during his time at Emporia State and Texas ties while at Stephen F. Austin, located in Nacogdoches, Texas.

“We’re definitely going to start in-state. At this institution, in the conference we play in, we’re going to recruit the planet,” Schneider said. “We’ll go wherever we have to go to get the right fit, that fits KU and fits our staff, but we will definitely start in the state of Kansas. There are good players in this state. There are players that are capable of helping our program go to another level. … I feel good about the fact that we’ve cultivated some pretty strong relationships in this state over the years.”

A native of Canyon, Texas, Schneider played at Wayland Baptist University and applied for women’s coaching jobs when he graduated.

On his father’s advice, he decided not to accept a position that in 1995 was referred to as a “restricted earnings coach,” a position that paid $16,000 and did not include recruiting. His father told him he needed to recruit because, “if you make a name as a recruiter, you’ll never be out of a job.”

“So I took a job at Emporia State, making $14,000,” working for new hire Cindy Stein. After winning 33 games in her third season, Stein left for Missouri, and Schneider, then 26, was named to replace her. He took his first team to the Final Four of the NCAA Div. II tournament.

“My best player was a Lithuanian who was 27,” Schneider said. “So we had some interesting discussions in the office.”

Schneider made an informed decision which path to pursue in choosing between men’s and women’s coaching.

He worked five weeks every summer in his father’s camps, which the son said, “were some of the most respected fundamental camps in the country. Then the whole month of July I would work camps, men’s and women’s camps. Eddie Sutton’s was one of them when he was at Oklahoma State, so I got to work on both sides. I chose women’s basketball for two reasons: No. 1, I felt like the women were more receptive to coaching, which was important to me. And No. 2, I could use him (nods toward father) and move up faster.”

Father and son faced each other in a Div. II NCAA Tournament game March 11, 2006, in Topeka between Emporia State and West Texas A&M, where Bob spent 25 years of his 43-year career as a head coach in high school and college.

The son defeated the father, 88-82.

“It was like that time Bear Bryant went out to the middle of the field after a coach who had played for him and coached for him beat him,” Bob Schneider said, referencing Gene Stallings. “I wanted to do that, but I have a bad back.”

The game that the apprentice surpassed the master turned out to be the last game Bob Schneider coached.

“I didn’t know it at the time because I didn’t decide until later in the summer,” Bob said, “but the last game I coached he beat us.”

Brandon’s brother Brett was an assistant to their father in that game. In addition to working for him for a dozen years, Brett has been a women’s basketball assistant coach at Missouri, Sam Houston State, UMKC, Memphis and Texas Tech until this past season. His father said he’s looking to get back into coaching. It’s the family business.

Schneider hasn’t assembled his coaching staff yet, but possible candidates could be his brother, Brett, and two coaches who attended the news conference: Emporia State head coach Jory Collins, who took over for Schneider as head coach when he left the Lady Hornets after winning a Div. II national title in 2010 to spend five years at Stephen F. Austin, and Kansas interim head coach Katie O’Connor.

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