It Takes A Village

Head men’s basketball coach Mark Schmidt reflects on the wins on and off the court

By Cameron Hurst, ’19

Mark Schmidt admitted that he didn’t allow himself to think about it during the season.

At the time of St. Bonaventure’s 79-56 victory over George Mason on Feb. 17, the Bonnies were just beginning a run in which they would win seven of their final eight regular-season games to enter the Atlantic 10 Conference Tournament as the fourth seed and the owners of a double-bye into the quarterfinals.

The last thing on Schmidt’s mind — even though he led the Bonnies out of the darkest period in program history and into its modern-day renaissance — was having just passed Larry Weise as the program’s winningest coach.

“When you’re going through something, you’re so obsessed with that day, with that game that you’re not really focusing on the record,” he said. “That’s the furthest thing from my mind. You’re just trying to get your team as prepared as you can for the next game. … Sometimes if you look ahead, you get bit by what you didn’t do today.”

But now, nearly three months since the Bonnies’ miracle run came just a three-pointer short of a chance to go to the NCAA Tournament for the third time, Schmidt is finally able to sit back and reflect on an achievement that might have been folly to even think of when he became the program’s 19th head coach in the spring of 2007.

“I always say the record isn’t my record, it’s our record,” Schmidt said. “It’s our program’s record, it’s the community’s record, it takes so many people to be successful. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes everybody to have a good basketball program.”

Mark Schmidt celebrates with students after his first Reilly Center Arena victory, a 97-80 win over Binghamton on Nov. 12, 2007.

That “village,” however, began as a hurting program. In the four years following the 2003 eligibility scandal, Schmidt’s predecessor had only amassed 22 wins, leaving only four scholarship players on the roster after the North Attleborough, Massachusetts, native became head coach on April 10, 2007.

But while other candidates were calling the job “career suicide,” Schmidt, a former assistant at Xavier University under Skip Prosser, was drawn to the opportunity to rebuild the program, citing the fan base as a main reason why. But even he didn’t fully understand how much basketball meant to the Bonaventure community until he was a part of it.

“I knew the importance of basketball here. I knew that they would get great crowds. I just didn’t know the true importance of it and how involved the community is and how important basketball is to the alumni,” he said. “To me, that was the biggest shock.”

He added, “I remember going to Buffalo and speaking and I remembered an older lady stood up and said to me, ‘Coach, it’s good for you to be here. But, understand, the winters up here are cold. But, for the last four years they’ve been really cold.’ That put things in perspective for me.”

From there, the rebuild was underway.

“The biggest thing as the head coach is that you’ve got to change the culture from a losing and a here-we-go-again, feeling-sorry-for-ourselves atmosphere to a program that’s going to learn how to win again,” Schmidt said of those early years. “It’s all about culture. It’s the work ethic, it’s that commitment. It’s earning the right to be successful.”

Schmidt still credits that first team, composed primarily of Rochester native Tyler Relph as well as Tyler Benson, Zarryon Fereti and Michael Lee, for setting the standard for modern Bonaventure basketball.

“They all started it,” he said of the four. “And, it wasn’t easy for them. Those guys, they bought into what we were selling. They set the foundation and you have to have somebody start it. We were lucky to have those four. They were character guys.”

Five seasons later, in 2012, the culture Schmidt helped create yielded its greatest result — the development of Andrew Nicholson into Atlantic 10 Player of the Year, and an Atlantic 10 Championship victory over the Xavier Musketeers, coached by Schmidt’s good friend Chris Mack.

“The last 20 seconds of that game, when Xavier went back on defense and stopped pressing and our guys were dribbling the ball around, to me, I wish everyone in the world could have the feeling that I had — that sense of accomplishment,” Schmidt remembered of that moment in Boardwalk Hall. “When you take over a program, you just don’t know if you’re going to have success. You put in all this time and all the things that you do, you just don’t know if what you envision will become reality.

“To see those kids … to see Andrew Nicholson’s face,” he added. “That’s the best moment, because you had time to enjoy it for those 20 seconds.”

But after another successful season four years later in 2016, capped by a win over a ranked Dayton Flyers team and a share of the A-10 regular-season title, the program’s faith was shaken after the Bonnies were left out of the NCAA Tournament.

Nevertheless, Schmidt used the infamous “snub” as a teaching moment.

“We try to build our program on handling adversity and trying to move on, and not letting adversity affect us in a negative way; using adversity to make us stronger,” he said of the setback. “I have a Martin Luther King Jr. quote that I talk a lot about: The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. If we didn’t have character guys in our program, it would have been a moment where it knocked us down and we stayed there.”

The Bonnies didn’t stay there.

Instead, two years later, the 2017-18 team — led by co-A10 Player of the Year Jaylen Adams and transfer Matt Mobley — rode a 12-game winning streak to finish out the regular season, a run highlighted by heart-stopping home wins over Rhode Island and Davidson, to finally avenge the disappointment of 2016. They not only earned an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament, but defeated a Power 5 program, UCLA, in the First Four.

“Getting to the NCAA Tournament and beating UCLA, it just proved to our guys that we can handle adversity,” Schmidt said. “We kept on fighting and we improved. We didn’t listen to the naysayers. Good things happen when you do that.”

The key to Schmidt’s success, he claims, has been forming strong relationships with his players — something he credits Prosser for teaching him during their time together.

“You become a father figure,” Schmidt said. “I say it all the time: My wife and I have three sons at home, but every year we have 13 stepchildren that become a part of our family forever. That’s what Skip taught me. It’s a family, it’s about relationships, it’s about treating people the right way, and that you may be the head coach of an important sport at the university, but that you’re no better than anyone else.

“He’s the mentor, he’s the reason I’m where I am because he taught me so many different lessons.”

And while the future is bright — the Bonnies return A-10 All-Rookie teamers Kyle Lofton and Osun Osunniyi and add transfer Bobby Planutis and four-star recruit Justin Winston, among others — Schmidt is more than cognizant of what being atop Bonaventure’s Mount Olympus means.

“These wins … they’re our wins,” he said. “That’s how I look at it. It’s not all about me. I’ve just been the beneficiary of a lot of people’s hard work.”

Cameron Hurst is a journalism and music double major at St. Bonaventure. The Jamestown, New York, native anticipates graduating in December 2019.