Despite dashed Olympic dreams, Jill Schneider’s legacy is golden

“What can you say about Aaliyah that hasn’t already been said? She’s incredible,” Monterey head coach Jill Schneider told the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal when Chavez broke the scoring record. “She’s a special player. Doesn’t surprise me at all. … Now every game she plays, she’s setting that bar higher and higher and higher.”

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Chavez is currently deciding where she’ll play college basketball next season between hometown program Texas Tech, Texas, Oklahoma, South Carolina and UCLA. She’s the type of player who can change the trajectory of a program and impact the national women’s college basketball landscape, so it’s no surprise that coaches from her short list of schools anxiously await her decision.

Of course, like any athlete, Chavez hasn’t achieved this level of success alone. Schneider is one of the people who have helped to shape her into the player she is today. Following a successful collegiate career, Schneider was selected to represent the United States in the 1980 Moscow Olympics. When that opportunity was taken away due to the American boycott of the Olympics, she got into coaching. The profession has allowed her to channel her competitive fire and purpose into shaping athletes like Chavez who represent the present and future of women’s basketball.

The boycott

In May 1980, Team USA women’s basketball co-captain Jill (Rankin) Schneider laced up her sneakers to compete against the world’s best at the Olympic qualifying tournament in Varna, Bulgaria. The Americans were competing for a spot in the Olympics in Moscow and poised to earn a spot on the podium.

Just weeks prior, Schneider had competed as a Tennessee Lady Vol in the 1980 AIAW national championship alongside teammates Holly Warlick and Cindy Noble. All three players were selected to represent the U.S. at the Olympics. Their head coach, Pat (Head) Summitt, was also selected as a Team USA assistant coach.

The Vols were defeated in the national championship game by Old Dominion, which was led by stars Anne Donovan and Nancy Lieberman. That duo was also selected for the 1980 Olympic team, though Lieberman chose to drop out of training camp in support of the expected boycott.

That group of college stars teamed up with other top names, including Montclair State College graduate Carol Blazejowski, who was a three time Kodak All-America selection (1976, 1977, 1978) and the first-ever recipient of the Wade Trophy in 1978; Stephen F. Austin State forward Rosie Walker; Kansas guard Lynette Woodard; and UCLA guard Denise Curry.

Team USA’s talented roster did clinch a spot in Moscow with a 5-1 record in the qualifying tournament. However, as a result of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the U.S. boycotted the Olympics, forcing the Americans to watch from home.

“[The boycott] was something that we were somewhat prepared for, even as we were playing our way through the qualifying tournament, because they had the conversations with us that this was something that was likely going to happen, and so it was kind of a foregone conclusion,” Schneider told The Next. “But until it was actually official, we just all kept playing like maybe there was a chance it wouldn’t happen. … It was just the major disappointment that was in, I guess, the actuality of it.”

For the Americans, the boycott was a stolen opportunity to showcase on a global stage the women’s basketball talent that had been developing for decades. Accelerating in 1972 with the landmark passage of Title IX, more women had the opportunity to compete in college athletics while receiving a life-changing education. College athletes such as UCLA guard Ann Meyers and Delta State center Lusia Harris had garnered national attention after earning the U.S. a silver medal in the first-ever Olympic women’s basketball competition at the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games.

The talent on the 1980 Olympic roster never got the chance to etch its chapter of Olympic history. Individual players felt the loss in different ways, but for Schneider, it was devastating.

“It was all really such a disappointing thing for me that I think at that point, I was just, I didn’t want to play anymore. I just, I was done,” Schneider said.

Lost momentum

Following the disappointing loss of an Olympic opportunity, several players went on to compete in the Women’s Professional Basketball League (WBL), infusing significant talent into the nascent league. Blazejowski, who had sat out the first two WBL seasons to preserve her amateur status to compete in the Olympics, was drafted by the New Jersey Gems. Lieberman, fresh off back-to-back AIAW championships at Old Dominion, was drafted by the Nebraska Wranglers alongside USA Basketball teammates Warlick and Rosie Walker.

Schneider was drafted by the New Orleans Pride but declared that she did not intend to play. She had heard from peers in and around the league that the business side of the league was struggling to stay afloat.

“People weren’t always getting consistent paychecks,” Schneider said. “And different things were going on. … It wasn’t necessarily as stable a league as I would have personally liked to have gone into.”

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Star players were entering a league plagued by instability, and the Olympic boycott didn’t help. League owners had hoped the visibility of women’s basketball at the Olympics would boost the league, but the boycott meant that the WBL lost a chance to capitalize on the international success of its incoming talent.

“It definitely was a setback,” Molly (Bolin) Kazmer, a former WBL player and a board member of the nonprofit Legends of the Ball, Inc., told The Next. “I don’t know if any of us, especially as the players, looked at [the WBL as] doomed, because we didn’t really know at that time period how much of a boost we would get [from the Olympics].

“But to hear some of the owners talk, like Marshall Geller from San Francisco Pioneers … he was going to sign some player to a big contract and create a big publicity boost out of the whole thing. So there were people that had plans to really capitalize on 1980 Olympics, but it kind of fizzled out before it even got to that point.”

Amid financial struggles, the WBL folded in 1981, an opportunity lost too soon for several of the nation’s top players to compete professionally in the U.S. While some of the players on the 1980 roster, including Woodard, would go on to compete in the 1984 Games, for most players the combination of the 1980 Olympic boycott and the demise of the WBL meant the end of playing careers that hardly even had a chance to get started.

‘I’ve been very blessed’

Summitt once said, “God doesn’t take things to be cruel; he takes things away to make room for other things.”

It’s an apt summary of the experience of the 1980 Olympic team, and it’s fitting that Schneider joined Summitt in Knoxville following the boycott to do color commentary and serve as a graduate assistant. The next season, she got a call from Texas coach Jody Conradt, who she’d known for years through the Texas basketball community.

“[My relationship with Jody] probably started when I was a junior or senior in high school, because Jody recruited me at University of Texas,” Schneider told said. “So I’d known her for quite a while.”

Schneider served as an assistant with Conradt at Texas for five years, including in 1986, when the Longhorns became the first team in NCAA history to complete an undefeated season. That year, the team was led by six seniors — Kamie Ethridge, Fran Harris, Gay Hemphill, Cara Priddy, Annette Smith and Audrey Smith — and defeated opponents by nearly 30 points per game.

Following her time with the Longhorns, Schneider resumed her coaching career in Texas at the high school level. She coached at Borger High School for 12 years, taking the program to state in 1994. She then transitioned to Monterey High School in Lubbock, where she’s still mentoring players like Chavez. In December 2019, Schneider reached the milestone of 600 wins in her high school coaching career, an achievement she attributes to the assistant coaches and players she’s worked with over the years.

In a pleasant twist of fate, Schneider did eventually win gold with Team USA. In 2011, USA Basketball’s then-director, Carol Callan, offered her the chance to coach the U-16 national team at the 2011 FIBA Americas U-16 Championship in Mexico City. She returned in 2012 to coach the U-17 team in Amsterdam. Both coaching stints ended in gold for the Americans and earned Schneider USA Basketball Developmental Coach of the Year honors.

By leading a group of young women to gold on the international stage, Schneider added more blocks to USA Basketball’s foundation of excellence, which was laid in part by her and her 1980 Olympic-qualifying teammates.

“I don’t really regret anything,” Schneider said. “I feel like I’ve been very blessed that just at every turn of my life, there was something else that came along. And so I’ve been coaching high school this long, and here I’m 66 years old and coaching the best player I’ll ever coach. That’s awesome.”

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