When coach George Schneider and his players from a little Catholic school in Latonia pulled off one of the seminal moments in Northern Kentucky basketball history by fighting their way to the 1965 championship game in the Sweet 16 at Freedom Hall in Louisville, one number always stood out to me.
George was just 29.
Amazing when you think about it. Northern Kentucky had had so little success downstate in the 47 years since the first tournament in 1918 that it really wasn’t expected.
Just four times had a local team made it to the title game – Newport twice in 1935 and 1954, Highlands in 1924 and Dayton in 1944. And none won the ultimate prize.
But as much as it mattered with those teams and their coaches – legendary names like Blue Foster and Stan Arnzen at Newport and Willard Bass at Dayton, they always seemed like ancient history. A once-in-a-decade thing.
But when George and his Holy Cross Indians battled their way to wins over Madisonville-North Hopkins Rosenwald, Lexington Dunbar and Hazel Green, it was clear they belonged. That they ran up against the state finalist from the previous year, Breckinridge County, led by all-time state tourney star Butch Beard and fell short, was no surprise.
But the tone had been set for Northern Kentucky. Two years later, Covington Catholic and Mote Hils lost the state title on a last-second buzzer-beating tip on the first of its five straight Sweet 16 trips. Then in 1981, Simon Kenton would come along to give Northern Kentucky its first-ever state title in 64 seasons.
Holmes would go twice, in 1978, when the Bulldogs should have won, and in 1990, when they did. Highlands would get there twice – in 1997 and then in 2021, when the Birds won it. CovCath would get there twice more – 2014 and 2018 – and win both. And then Cooper made it to the 2017 championship game.
That’s 12 championship games in the 61 years from that 1965 Holy Cross run that seemed to send a message that the state tournament was a place Northern Kentucky teams could go – and win.
A lot of the credit should go to the work of that young coach, George Schneider, who was just getting started in a long, productive leadership life across so much of secondary education here.
Surely, they’ll be talking about much of George’s half-century career Monday at St. Barbara’s Church, Turkeyfoot Road, Erlanger, with visitation at 4 p.m. and the Mass of Christian Burial following at 6 p.m. after his July 21 death at the age of 89.
And maybe talk about how George and his Holy Cross coaching buddy, Tony Bezold, who died last month, are probably having breakfast and talking sports. Or how George started out at his alma mater Newport Central Catholic, as a coach after graduating from then Villa Madonna College, and as an athlete on the 1954 state championship baseball team. And then on to create the program that to this day punches so much above its weight at Holy Cross.
But other numbers for George just defy belief. I was at CovCath as a teacher and coach when George got there at what had been an archrival of his two previous schools as an assistant principal for a school that was fighting its way back from an overly progressive open-campus era that had gone too far, too fast. George’s gravitas, along with principal Ken Gross, helped get things back on track.
But as I was leaving after six years to help NKU get started in athletics, George was just starting a 36-year career at CovCath. As a teacher, basketball and baseball coach, athletic coordinator, dean of discipline and attendance, business manager, director of operations and – as his official obituary describes it – “whatever they needed.”
George succeeded me as baseball coach and I’ve always thought that what made him so able to handle all those different duties was that he never stopped thinking as a coach – with a game plan, and the need to get his team all going in the same direction with the same goals and competing to get the job done. Which CovCath certainly did the way it enabled the support committee to re-make both the athletic and academic facilities during George’s time there and with his leadersip.
But it wasn’t just as an educator that George excelled. Between his children and step-children, grandkids and step-grandkids, great grand-kids and step-great-grandkids, there are 61 in the Schneider clan who called family man George their head coach.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X @dweber3440.