They’re going to be talking about Jonesville native Frank Schneider at McKneely Funeral Home in Hammond Saturday at a memorial gathering from 1-3 p.m.
Frank Wes Schneider III died at age 77 on December 22, and with his passing we lost someone who embraced coaching basketball, even as a player for Block High School and Louisiana Christian University, then known as Louisiana College. By his dedication, hustle, knowledge of basketball and a sheer will to win, he was a coach on the court before coaching by the bench.
He led Block to the Class A state championship in 1966, and during his playing career at LCU (1967-71) the Wildcats never had a losing record and qualified for the NAIA national tournament in 1971 after setting a school record for victories in a season.
He coached at four different high schools, including LaSalle and Bunkie, before landing his first collegiate job, coaching women’s basketball at LC. Over six seasons there (1979-85), he coached the Lady Wildcats to three 20-win seasons, one AIAW Final Four and three quarterfinal appearances. During his final season there, 1984-85, the Lady Wildcats won 27 games, then a school record, and beat the top-ranked team in the nation, Carson-Newman.
Southeastern Louisiana lured him to Hamond, where he coached for the next 17 seasons and won 229 games, including a 24-5 record in 1993-94.
During his college coaching career, he coached 9 All-Americans, 11 All-Louisiana honorees and one conference (Gulf States Conference) Player of the Year – Janice Joseph Richard, who later coached as his assistant at SLU before launching her own highly successful head coaching career. With Richard the player leading the way, Schneider coached the 1984-85 Lady Wildcats to the NAIA national championship tournament in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and he was selected as an American Women’s Sports Federation All-American coach for the second straight year. The Lady Wildcats were 47-12 over that two-year span.
In 2002, he left SLU to accept a job offer from Greg Williams, a good friend in the coaching ranks. Williams had been hired as the first head coach of the Detroit Shock of the WNBA and he wanted Schneider to be his assistant. In a 2006 interview Schneider told me he had gotten “worn out” at Southeastern, where he worked for 10 different athletics directors, and was ready for a change. That stint with the Shock was short-lived, however but he was involved with a WNBA championship team.
It wasn’t his first foray into the WNBA. While he was coaching at SLU, he served as a consultant for the WNBA’s first championship team, the Houston Comets, in 1997.
Two decades ago, Schneider, at age 57, quit his job as the boys basketball coach at Ponchatoula during the Christmas break in just his second season there. In an interview a month later, he told me, during a break from teaching a world geography class, of his frustrations.
“I was hired to come in and clean up this mess,” he said. “The players were running the program, and the program was out of control. Players came to practice when they wanted to come to practice. They’d fight, and their parents would fight in the stands. There was very little discipline.
“I knew that going in,” he continued, “but I didn’t realize the magnitude of the problem.” He endured an 8-18 season in his first year there and the team was 2-9 when he resigned. PHS struggled for several years after that until coach Thomas Taylor took over, and he has guided Ponchatoula to winning seasons the last seven years.
As a husband, father, grandfather, teacher and coach, Frank Schneider will no doubt be fondly remembered at Saturday’s gathering as someone who instilled discipline and hustle and attention to detail in all that he did.
By the way …
Former Alexandria Aces pitcher James Frisbie has been hired, again, as the field manager for the Lincoln (Nebraska) Saltdogs. He was the team’s manager in 2020 and ’21 and has had extensive professional baseball experience as a coach or manager for the last wo decades.
The past five seasons, Frisbie has coached at the Major League level. He served as a utility coach with the Detroit Tigers in 2021 and 2022 and spent the last three years with the Washington Nationals under Dave Martinez as a utility coach, working with young hitters such as CJ Abrams.
Frisbie pitched professionally for four seasons in the Texas-Louisiana League, spending three seasons with the Alexandria Aces (’98, ’00-01) and one season with the Lafayette Bayou Bullfrogs and the Greenville Bluesmen.