‘All about the people’: Former Shocker AD Jim Schaus reflects on Hall of Fame career
Nearly two decades have past since the last time Jim Schaus was back in Koch Arena.
Wichita State athletics enjoyed unprecedented success when Schaus was the athletic director from 1999 to 2008, as he spearheaded the Roundhouse Renaissance fundraising campaign, hired many of the most successful coaches in school history and helped the Shockers dominate the Missouri Valley Conference.
Being back in the basketball sanctuary he helped create led to plenty of nostalgia for Schaus, who was inducted into the Shocker Sports Hall of Fame along with Kellyn Johnson Taylor (women’s distance runner), Karma Wagner Mason (women’s bowling) and Mackenzie Wright (softball) this past weekend and honored at halftime of Saturday’s men’s basketball game.
“Wichita is such a special place and it’s all about the people,” Schaus told The Eagle. “We had great people on campus, a great president in Don Beggs, great coaches, my staff, the community, the donors. That’s what made what we did so special because it was a team effort. It was never about one person. So it’s been a fun trip down memory lane, but I had to make sure I knew which lane I was in because I don’t recognize so many things now.”
Schaus left WSU to serve as the athletic director at Ohio, a football-playing school, for 11 years before transitioning to the commissioner of the Southern Conference in 2019; he retired in 2023. He didn’t hesitate to say his time with the Shockers was the best job in his career.
When asked what made WSU special, Schaus kept coming back to the same thing: the people.
Not just the fans and donors, many of whom were there this past Friday for the special dinner to honor the Hall of Fame inductees, but also the people he was surrounded by at WSU. He enjoyed seeing former staff members like Korey Torgerson and Gretchen Torline and volleyball coach Chris Lamb, his first coaching hire, and track and field coach Steve Rainbolt, his second coaching hire, as well as the venerable broadcasting duo of Mike Kennedy and Dave Dahl.
“It was just a really special time for me and my family and I absolutely loved our time in Wichita,” Schaus said. “I’ll always remember how much everyone got behind that Roundhouse Renaissance campaign. I think everyone was ready for it. We hadn’t been winning. We had success, but it was quite a bit in the past. So people were ready for it. We had great leadership with president Don Beggs and then just great people. It’s really special when it’s a team effort. All of those different pieces had to come together at the right time and we were just blessed that they did.”
WSU notably excelled in a variety of sports under Schaus’ reign, but it all began with reviving the men’s basketball program by nailing the hire of Mark Turgeon in 2000.
At the time, Turgeon was young and relatively unknown as a head coach after compiling a 25-29 record at Jacksonville State in two years. But Turgeon received a strong recommendation from former Vanderbilt head coach Kevin Stallings, who worked with Turgeon at the University of Kansas, and Schaus was intrigued by how Turgeon had more than doubled his win total from his first to second year on the job.
“I did a lot of homework on Mark and really just loved his basketball knowledge, his pedigree and his passion,” Schaus said. “He did such a fantastic job because when he got here, we really didn’t have a lot of resources. I think we had two winning seasons in the previous 12 years. And you look at his record, his win total went up each year.”
Not only was Schaus a tremendous people person, which helped with the donors, but he also had an uncanny knack for hiring head coaches.
Turgeon’s success in men’s basketball helped fund a turnaround in women’s sports under Schaus. Lamb (volleyball) and Rainbolt (track and field) are in their third decade coaching at WSU and both have led their respective programs to unprecedented success. Schaus also hired Tom McCurdy (women’s golf), Jody Adams (women’s basketball), Chris Young (tennis), Randy Hasenbank (cross country), Marc Burns (cross country) and Tim Walton (softball), who all are among the most successful coaches in their program’s history.
Walton is now a Hall of Fame coach at Florida, where he won back-to-back national titles in 2014 and 2015.
WSU won the MVC All-Sports Trophy in 2004 for the first time since 1988 and ended up winning four straight before Schaus departed. It was his foundation of coaching hires that helped pave the way for the Shockers to win seven more from 2008-17 before leaving the MVC for the American Athletic Conference.
And when Turgeon bolted for Texas A&M in 2007, Schaus found a way to one-up himself by hiring another young-and-hungry head coach in Gregg Marshall, who went on to take the program to even greater heights.
“I think you always look for coaches with integrity, with a lot of energy and I liked hiring head coaches when possible because they knew what it was like to be in that chair,” Schaus said. “No one bats 1.000 when you’re hiring head coaches, but we were very blessed.”
If Schaus wasn’t perfect, he was about as close as you could get. So what was the key?
“You try to ask the coaches, ‘What do you want? What’s your vision?’” Schaus said. “You try to help and ask questions like, ‘How’s recruiting going? What are we trying to accomplish in scheduling?’ You have to spend time with them, not just leave them alone, but strike a balance between figuring out what’s their vision and what are they trying to accomplish and how can I help you do that, while also not micromanaging them. You have to let them do their job.”
This story was originally published January 21, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
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