Earlier this off-season, three-year head coach, Everett Hartman announced that he would be retiring from coaching collegiate basketball, after changing a culture and cultivating success in such a short span of time. Athletic Director Mark Majeski took time to find a suitable replacement for Hartman and it led him to Joe Schaumburg, who was officially announced as the new men’s basketball coach for the 2019-2020 season.
“Joe is a well known coach with extensive, successful experience recruiting in Oregon. He is known as an excellent teacher, communicator, and mentor with a relationships-based approach. We look forward to Joe building upon the great foundation Everett Hartman and his staff created,” said Majeski (per LBCC athletics website).
Schaumburg’s role as head coach will be his first venture as a collegiate head coach, but the experience he has found in coaching dates back years and success has been something that is not quite new to him. Make no mistake, Schaumburg’s path to a full-time head coaching gig took grit, determination, and figuring out how to separate himself from a player to a coach.
“It started with 5th grade girls volleyball. I had been playing sports since I was five, so once I was done I felt like I had needed to become a part of something bigger again, but when I started, I never intended to be a college coach,” said Schaumburg.
Schaumburg started his coaching ventures in the mid 90s, when he coached 7th and 8th grade girls basketball. The work with kids and younger athletes was good for his development as a coach entirely, and showed him that the process will make you a better coach in the future.
“I’m really proud of my experience at the younger level. I wanted to get into coaching better athletes but I had a mentor early on who said “Learn how to coach kids who can’t play first, then It will be easy to coach kids who know how to play,” added Schaumburg.
After his work with middle school ball, Schaumburg landed a coaching job at his alma mater in San Francisco, George Washington High School. He then moved on to his first role in community college athletics, working as an assistant for his college alma mater as well, at Skyline Community College in San Bruno, California. Both jobs garnered less than favorable experiences for Joe.
“At the time I was really asking myself if I was meant to coach girls basketball, but I realized later on that I was unfairly comparing teams based on my past experiences playing for them, which wasn’t fair to those kids.”
During his early coaching stints, Schaumburg reached out to a friend he had grown up with Graham Betchart, who now works as a big time sports psychologist. Betchart had offered advice to Schaumburg early, which helped him identify that he still had a long way to go as a coach.
“I was an old school coach. I was hard, I was disciplinary. My way or the highway. You can have a lot of success with that style, but having good interactions with young players is very important, otherwise you run the risk of driving a kid away from the sport, which is a tragedy,” said Schaumburg.
He wanted to move away from the old school approach and wanted to move his focus towards building player relationships, working towards their strengths and weaknesses, as well as understanding limits and the overall game. He strongly believes that each player can get better through hard work and practice and that noticing what goes right first is a step in the right direction, rather than focusing on what’s going wrong. His change in coaching style took the better part of 12 years to mold into, but he has made it a focal point of his style.
Schaumburg soon followed his friend for an opportunity to coach at Mission High School in San Francisco, a school that at the time, needed all of the help it could get in not only athletics, but education as well. If you were kicked out of school more than once in San Francisco; Mission would be the place you’d end up.
“Lots of these kids needed a leader. Male figures in their life failed them over and over, so they were hard to reach [out] to, but once you kept that consistency, they started to truly believe they wanted to see them succeed. That’s how it changed at Mission.”
His help with the staff at Mission completely turned the school around, and years later in 2017, the school became the first public school from San Francisco to win the division state championship. The school also now has a waiting list for students that look to enroll.
Schaumburg’s next stint saw him land a job in Monmouth with the Western Oregon Wolves. He started off with a salary that didn’t even cover his rent, and had to coordinate with friends to have roomates that could split the monthly charge. After some time with WOU, Schaumburg had to move on due to expenses, but he soon found a home in Portland, working as an assistant for Lewis and Clark College. He got in connection with Coach Gibson, the current women’s head coach, and helped as an assistant with him at Pacific University in Forest Grove. He proceeded to take a year off from coaching, and now finds himself here with his first collegiate head coaching gig.
“At this point, It’s not really about chasing any dreams like coaching division 1 or something, which is why I love LBCC. I can run my program and work with people I want to work with each and everyday.”
Schaumburg is a welcome hire to lead the culture that Everett Hartman started, while also making it his own. Teamwork, hard work in the gym and the film room, and a strong player bond are all essential to success and those values are engrained well into the team. Schaumburg wants to fundamentally stand for three things on defense; ball pressure, rotation, and rebounding. On offense, he knows how quick you have to move the ball on a 30 second shot clock, and looks to utilize his big men in the paint to free up looks for his guards lurking in the backcourt. Schaumburg truly believes that you can capitalize on great player relationships, and how that mindset molds him into being a better coach and leader.
“I’ll give you this, I stole my coach philosophy from a french canadian chef, I forget his name, but he said he was a fan of the carrot, not the recipe,” said Schaumburg.
“What that means for me in basketball is I’m a fan of the player, not the playbook. Playbooks will be thin so we know it and know it well, so when it’s time to go out there, we don’t think; We just go hard.”
Story by Cam Hanson