The Schneiter Standard: North Shore's New Coaching Standards

Every day before practice, basketball coach John Schneiter hooked a mop around his waist and cleaned the basketball floor in Mac Gym.

P.E. classes and recess were held there during the winter months so Schneiter needed to wipe off the excess salt.

To his team, he looked like a human tractor. 

McHugh didn’t hire Schneiter for his cleaning expertise, though. His coaching ability was considered second to none. McHugh didn’t have to look far for his first major coaching hire. Schneiter was the long-time basketball coach at nearby New Trier High School.

When Schneiter retired from teaching in 1997, McHugh reached out to the hall-of-fame coach and asked him to teach the game of basketball at North Shore.

Schneiter’s coaching tenure marks the start of a sweeping transition from relatively inexperienced coaches to larger and more knowledgeable coaching staffs to provide instruction at a more competitive level. North Shore now counts 40 people on its coaching roster; more than double what it was when McHugh started in 1994.

North Shore’s ability to bring on extra coaches has been buoyed by a growing enrollment at the school. The Upper School now has almost 200 students, way up from the 100-plus enrollment numbers that the school counted throughout the 1990s.

In the late 1990s, North Shore’s entire coaching staff comprised in-house teachers. The school encouraged its staff to participate in extra-curricular activities and coaching was an obvious outlet. But not every volunteer coach was fit for the job. Many were only recreational athletes of the sport they were coaching with little competitive experience. When the better athletes wanted to be more serious, problems arose.

“[Schneiter] was really a great teacher,” McHugh said. “There was starting to be a greater appreciation from our school community. There was a realization that we wanted to be equal in athletics as we were in the classroom.”

Schneiter’s coaching style paralleled McHugh’s vision for North Shore. Practices run by previous coaches emphasized a lot of intra-squad scrimmages, but Schneiter focused on tactics and strategy. McHugh remembers watching a game and being amazed at how Schneiter’s teams would instantly switch defenses after the coach yelled out code words from the bench.

“I wasn’t even mature enough to appreciate just how brilliant and witty he was when I was a senior in high school,” said Brian Jessen, a 2002 graduate of North Shore who played three years under Schneiter. “He was a simple guy and really enjoyed finishing up his career at a school where he was really teaching the game.”

Following in the example of Schneiter, McHugh looked for coaches who had played or coached the game at high levels, both inside and outside of the school community.

Current field hockey coach Sarah Mills, along with former assistants Hillary Wirtz and Read Powel all played college field hockey. One of the school’s most recent additions, fifth-grade assistant and head volleyball coach Kelly Keporos, was a former four-year scholarship volleyball player at Northwestern University.

“We’ve put a lot of thought into the construction of these coaching staffs,” McHugh said.

McHugh first met current golf coach Joe Bosco about a dozen years ago when North Shore initiated a boys golf team. At the time, Bosco was a golf instructor at WillowHill Golf Course in Northbrook. For a number of years, Bosco agreed to be an unofficial assistant coach of sorts, a friend of the program. He provided a practice venue for the Raiders and facilitated practices at the golf course, taking the team through various training drills.

Then early in the summer of 2010, Dick Wagley, the head golf pro at Indian Hill Golf Club in Winnetka, suggested Bosco take the recently vacated head-coaching position at North Shore. After talking to McHugh, Bosco came on board just in time for the 2010 fall season.

Bosco, one of the best junior golf instructors in the country according to Sports Illustrated’s Golf Magazine in 2011, had never run a high school team before. But that didn’t stop him from having high expectations when he first started.

“My resolve was that we were eventually going to win a state championship,” Bosco said. “That wasn’t just hope; that was a goal.”

Bosco’s confidence was there from the start when he took over in 2010; he didn’t need anyone to set the standard for him. Schneiter and Bosco were bookends in McHugh’s goal of hiring more experienced coaches.

Yet it was the influence of another coaching figure and his unconventional training methods that would catalyze a larger change in the school’s attitudes towards athletics. 

Stay tuned for Part Three on Wednesday.

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