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The Official Web Site of the WVU Varsity Club |
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Profile: Fred Schaus
In the spring of 1981, West Virginia was in the midst of a significant financial crisis in which $650,000 in funds had erroneously been counted twice. After an extensive audit, it was revealed that monies from Mountaineer Illustrated were used for personal purposes, projected television revenues totaling as much as $250,000 were never promised and never realized, and an ill-fated midseason football trip to Hawaii cost the WVU athletic department $137,000 more than it had anticipated. The school had broken a contract to play a football game with San Jose State and the California school was threatening legal action. Basketball coach Gale Catlett and his team were forced to travel by bus for the remainder of the ’81 season and his summer tour to Australia was abruptly canceled. Those were just some of the circumstances confronting Schaus when he returned to his alma mater to begin his tenure as the school’s ninth athletic director in the summer of 1981. “I came in with my eyes wide open,” Schaus said in 1989. In every respect 56-year-old Frederick Appleton Schaus was the right person for the job. A man of impeccable credentials, Schaus had finished a stint at Purdue where he was the school’s associate athletic director. Prior to that, he coached the Boilermaker basketball team for five seasons, earning a 96-58 record. Purdue basketball coach and athletic director George King, who once served as Schaus’ assistant coach at West Virginia University, lured him away from the Los Angeles Lakers in 1972. “The NCAA tournament was held in Los Angeles that year,” Schaus said. “George didn’t want to do both jobs and he asked me if I was interested in getting back into coaching and I said I would.” Fred spent 12 years with the Lakers from 1960-72, first as a coach for seven seasons from 1961-67 and later as vice president and general manager working for owner Jack Kent Cooke. “I loved Jack Kent Cooke. I really did,” said Schaus. “He was a tough, tough man to work for – really demanding individual, but a brilliant guy. He’d reach the point were a guy was about to go off the edge, then he’d compliment or congratulate him just at the right time, and he got a tremendous amount of workload from his people.” As a Laker coach Schaus led LA to four NBA championship appearances against the Boston Celtics, losing twice in the seventh game in 1962 and 1966. His best year with the Lakers came in 1962 when his team posted a 54-26 record. In six seasons with the Lakers, Schaus had a 270-210 record. His 33 playoff wins still rank among the 30 best in NBA history. Schaus coached Hall of Famers Jerry West and Elgin Baylor, and was the team’s general manager when center Wilt Chamberlain helped the Lakers to an NBA-record 33-game winning streak and the league title in 1972. Fred’s keen interest in basketball began at Newark High School near Columbus, Ohio, where he led his team to the state championship and was an all-state center in 1943. Instead of going to college, Schaus enlisted in the Navy and was stationed at Memphis Naval Air Training Center as an aviation ordnance instructor. While in the service, Schaus struck up a friendship with West Virginia’s first basketball All-American Scotty Hamilton. Schaus had another link to WVU in its basketball coach John Brickels, whose brother in-law was Schaus’ junior high coach Paul Harlow. When he was discharged in 1946, Schaus knew he was going to college to play basketball and he had to make a decision between West Virginia and Ohio State. Perhaps pushing the pendulum in West Virginia’s favor was the fact that several players from Schaus’ high school had had little success playing for the Buckeyes. Whatever the reason, Schaus enrolled at WVU for the 1946-47 season and soon became one of the Mountaineers’ top players. He helped West Virginia to a National Invitational Tournament bid in 1947 where it was nipped in the semifinals by Utah, 64-62. Schaus scored 1,009 points in 61 career games for an average of 16.5 points per game. The 6-foot-5 forward’s 442 points scored in 1949 were a school record until Mark Workman eclipsed that total in 1951. He scored a career-high 34 points against VMI and his average of 18.4 points per game ranked 10th nationally during a senior season in which he was named a third team All-American by the Helms Foundation. Schaus, elected class president in 1949, graduated one year early. Once asked what his most memorable achievement at WVU was, Schaus replied: “I met my wife Barbara here. We sat next to each other in a lot of classes where they had alphabetical seating.” After graduation, he signed a professional contract with the Fort Wayne Pistons and played four seasons with them from 1949-53. His best year came in 1951 when he averaged 15.1 points per game and was named to the West team in the first-ever NBA all-star game played in Boston on March 2, 1951. He scored eight points in a 17-point loss to the East all-stars. Schaus finished his five-year professional career with the New York Knicks in 1954. In 334 career games, he averaged 12.2 points per game and in 21 career playoff games he scored 247 points for an average of 11.8 points per game. He was the first player in Fort Wayne history to score more than 1,000 points in a season. In the meantime, Schaus had always had an interest in coaching and kept notebooks full of plays he had diagrammed during his spare time. In the summer of 1954, West Virginia University was in the market for a new basketball coach when Red Brown took over the athletic director position that came open due to the death of Roy “Legs” Hawley. Although Schaus didn’t have any coaching experience, Brown thought he would be the perfect man to coach Rod Hundley – West Virginia’s star player and resident problem child. “The fact that (Fred) was young and was a hero of Rod’s was in his favor,” Brown was quoted in Hundley’s first autobiography Clown. “I was impressed with Fred’s manner – calm, confident, fatherly, despite his youth, and I figured he’d make a good mentor for Rod.” Schaus proved to be much, much more than just a guidance counselor for Hot Rod Hundley. WVU won 19 games his first season in 1955, defeated VMI, Washington & Lee and George Washington to win the Southern Conference tournament, and advanced to the NCAA tournament for the first time in school history. From 1956 to 1960, West Virginia won an NCAA-record 44 consecutive regular season league games as a member of the Southern Conference. The streak began with an 84-62 win over Virginia Tech on Jan. 6, 1956, and ended on Jan. 30, 1959, when William & Mary upset the Mountaineers, 94-86 in Norfolk, Va. In 1997 Mike Douchant, a college basketball writer for CBS SportsLine.com, listed Schaus’ three-straight unbeaten Southern Conference seasons as the 16th greatest achievement in major college basketball history. Schaus also built up a 42-game home win streak at the Field House from Dec. 1, 1956, until Feb. 20, 1960. In addition, his remarkable run included a 63-5 record against Southern Conference teams, a six-year 58-5 mark at home, and three straight seasons in which his teams averaged more than 80 points per game from 1958-60 to rank either second or third in the country. His club became the first to ever be nationally televised in the state of West Virginia when his Mountaineers defeated Holy Cross on Feb. 7, 1959. From 1957 until 1960, West Virginia was ranked in the Top 10 each season and Fred’s teams won 10 games against nationally ranked foes. Perhaps his most memorable pair of wins came against No. 5-ranked Kentucky and No. 1-ranked North Carolina to win the 1957 Kentucky Invitational. The win over North Carolina snapped the Tarheels’ 37-game winning streak. Schaus is also one of just two coaches to beat Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp twice in Lexington (Georgia Tech coach John Hyder was the other). From the end of 1955 until 1960, Schaus’ West Virginia teams were in the national rankings for 60 straight weeks. His 1958 squad finished the year with a 26-2 record ranked No. 1 in the country, but an injury to guard Don Vincent in the Southern Conference tournament championship game was a big reason WVU lost to Manhattan in the first round of the NCAA tournament in New York City. With a much smaller lineup in 1959, Schaus utilized a zone press that gave opposing teams fits and led West Virginia to an NCAA tournament runner-up finish to California. All-American guard Jerry West led the team in scoring with an average of 26.6 points per game. “Everybody always mentions that I had Jerry West and Hot Rod Hundley, but they never mention my other players,” Schaus once said. “There was no question how great West and Hundley were, but we had a lot of fine players to compliment them.” The coach had a reputation for being a strict disciplinarian and didn’t tolerate nonsense, “We were scared to death of him,” admitted Charleston guard Bobby Joe Smith. In his final season at WVU in 1960, the Mountaineers compiled a 26-5 record. By the time he left West Virginia University to coach the Los Angeles Lakers in 1961, Schaus won 146 of 183 games for an amazing 79.8 winning percentage. “I had recruited Rod Thorn and he was a freshman and I knew we would win for the next few years,” Schaus once told Pittsburgh author Jim O’Brien. “But the Lakers looked like an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.” Schaus is one of just four coaches to have ever taken a college team to the Final Four and a pro team to the NBA finals: Larry Brown (Kansas and Philadelphia), Dr. Jack Ramsay (St. Joseph’s and Portland) and Butch Van Breda Kolff (Princeton and Los Angeles) are the others. More than 40 years later, his teams and players still own 40 West Virginia University records, including highest scoring average for a season (89.5 ppg.), most victories in a season (29 in 1959) and highest winning percentage in a season (92.9 in 1958). Schaus’ 72.3 career winning percentage (West Virginia and Purdue) is ranked 29th in NCAA history. Those were among the items listed on the resume Schaus dropped on West Virginia president Harry B. Heflin’s desk in 1981. Two outstanding coaches were already in place in Don Nehlen and Gale Catlett. Schaus had to boost the department’s low morale and institute tighter restrictions on spending. Nehlen took the football team to four straight bowls from 1981-84 and Catlett went to the NCAA tournament six times from 1982 to 1989. West Virginia, under Schaus’ watchful eye, quickly turned a deficit into a large profit and managed to make important improvements to the football stadium and save money for the future. He served on the men’s basketball NCAA tournament selection committee and was one of a handful of athletic administrators in favor of creating a coalition to adopt a new football television package. That has since led to untold millions for everyone. “The sentiment of almost all of the schools was that we’ve got to hang together and remain unified and not for schools or conferences to go out on their own and sign their own contracts. That would cause chaos, dilute the product and reduce television fees for all,” were Schaus’ futuristic remarks in 1984. As it turned out, only Notre Dame chose to go it alone. When Schaus retired in 1989 the football team had just completed an 11-1 season and played Notre Dame for the national championship, and the basketball team lost to Duke in the second round of the NCAA tournament. “Fred brought class, respect and distinction not only to West Virginia University, but also to the state,” said longtime sportswriter Mickey Furfari. “He never had to apologize for anything he did or said.” Today Fred and Barbara spend time traveling around the country to visit their five grandchildren. His son Jim is the athletic director at Wichita State. Schaus has said repeatedly that his last eight years at WVU were his most enjoyable. Considering the dire circumstances he was presented with, they were certainly among his most important years of service to West Virginia University – that’s for sure. He was inducted into the West Virginia University Sports Hall of Fame in 1992. |
The
West Virginia University athletic department needed a man of Fred
Schaus’ reputation to clean up the mess it had gotten
itself into. |
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