Husband, father, teacher, coach, umpire, referee. For decades, Bill Schmidt wore all those hats simultaneously.
“I don’t know how he found the time,” said Carol, his wife of 59 years. “He worked it all in somehow, because he enjoyed it. He did it for the love of the game.”
Mr. Schmidt died Aug. 3 at age 80 of complications from heart disease. He had been a longtime teacher and coach at both St. Pius X and Windsor high schools.
Mr. Schmidt graduated from Roosevelt High, where he played baseball and football, and went to St. Louis University on a baseball scholarship.
He was introduced to his future bride by his father.
“I had an afterschool job at a furniture store where his dad was a salesman,” Carol said.
The two were married in July 1962, while he was still in college, and had their first child by graduation day.
He attended graduate school at Washington University.
“His brother was at Washington University, and told the coaches about Bill,” Carol said. “He went and interviewed, and they offered him a graduate assistantship, which cut the tuition way down.”
Mr. Schmidt coached baseball and football there, and the Schmidts had two more children by the time he earned his master’s degree in 1967.
“He was under a lot of pressure,” Carol said. “We talked about it in later years. He insisted it wasn’t hard, because he absolutely loved what he was doing.”
Mr. Schmidt taught and coached three years at the former De Andreis High School, a small private boys school. Then, in 1970, he accepted a job teaching and coaching at St. Pius X Catholic High School in Crystal City.
“He was head football coach; he assisted the late Ralph Boyer in basketball and baseball, and was head track coach,” Carol said. “He loved it! It was what he wanted to do from the time he was a child, to be in sports and work with young people.”
Larry Kist of St. Louis played linebacker on those early teams.
“To properly frame his impact, it’s important to realize what he walked into in 1970,” Kist said. “The two previous seasons they were 1-9. His first year, Pius went 6-3-1, then had winning seasons the next four out of five years.”
A big part of those successes was Mr. Schmidt’s style, in the classroom and on the field.
“He knew the Xs and Os of football, and he was a great teacher of it,” Kist said. “But he also was a coach we respected. There was a mutual understanding there.
“He expected two things: give your best effort every day, and have fun. He didn’t expect us to win every game, and that was OK; there were better teams. But if we did those two things, he would be OK with it, and so were we.”
Marty Zielonko, 66, of Festus came to St. Pius X in 1977 and taught and coached alongside Mr. Schmidt.
“He was always so good to the students and the athletes,” Zielonko said. “The atmosphere at Pius wasn’t about winning games; it was about turning out good people. He was a calm, quiet guy, very quick-witted, with a dry sense of humor. And he was always in a good mood, very even-keeled all the time. He and Carol would host gatherings for the staff after games, and you wouldn’t know whether they’d won or lost.”
Carol eventually began working at St. Pius as a secretary, and the couple was instrumental in setting up the annual charity auction for the school.
Mr. Schmidt, meanwhile, took on baseball umpire and basketball referee duties at schools all around the area.
“He was well-regarded throughout the county in all his roles,” Zielonko said. “He knew his craft, knew the rules backward and forward. And he treated everyone well. He was a gentle man and a gentleman.”
Mr. Schmidt left St. Pius in 1982 to be head football coach at Windsor High.
“It was a hard decision to leave,” Carol said. “St. Pius was such a community-oriented school, and we had a lot of friends there.”
Mr. Schmidt retired in 2002.
“But he got a little restless,” Carol said. “He went back to Pius to be an assistant football coach under Rick Overberg. He was still refereeing basketball and umpiring baseball, too.”
Once he retired for good, Mr. Schmidt enjoyed fishing, hunting and horse racing, which he approached in a typically methodical fashion.
“It was almost a passion,” Carol said. “He liked to study the horses, whether they ran well on dry or wet, how they did at the quarter mile.”
Mr. Schmidt’s health began to deteriorate about 15 years ago.
“He was a longtime diabetic,” Carol said. “He took care of himself, and having an active lifestyle helped, but his kidneys started to fail, and he went on dialysis in 2010 and had a kidney transplant in 2014.”
In recent months, he grew sicker.
“He went on hospice, and died at home,” Carol said.
She said her husband would want to be remembered as “a good, Christian man who had principles, cared about other people, was kind.”
Zielonko said Mr. Schmidt was an excellent mentor and role model.
“As an old guy, I try to tell young people: Bill Schmidt was one of the people who made Pius so much more than just a school.”