Part of the reason was that he wanted to play both basketball and baseball and Wright State – under new head coach and former big leaguer Ron Nischwitz – would allow him to do that.
But that’s not what sealed the deal Schaefer said Friday afternoon.
“One of the things I really appreciated about Wright State was Jim Brown,” he said in reference to the Raiders’ assistant coach who recruited him.
The day Schaefer and his parents visited Wright State, they were walking with Brown around the then-sparse campus and were a good distance from the few buildings there when they came upon a kid in a wheelchair who was about to battle a long stretch of sidewalk going up a hill.
“Jim sees him and while he’s talking to us, he walks over to the guy, gets behind his chair and starts pushing him up the hill,” Schaefer said. “He took him all the way up and just kept talking to us.”
As he was recounting the scene from 50 years past, the emotion well up in him and his voice began to waver: “I remember thinking, ‘Now that’s a guy I want to play for.’”
That fall Schaefer and five other new recruits did join a Raiders’ team that was returning some veteran players of note, especially three dynamic leaders in Bob Grote, Lyle Falknor and Ricky Martin, who today is known as Abdul Shakur Ahmad.
And just like that guy in the wheelchair, Schaefer soon found himself on an unexpected ride to higher ground.
The Raiders team now was being coached by Marcus Jackson, who had replaced John Ross, the man who started the program five seasons earlier before moving on to an assistant athletic director’s job.
“Ricky and I, I mean Abdul and I, we were co-captains and I remember Marcus called us in,” Grote said. “We said, ‘Coach, tell us what to do and we’ll take care of it.’”
“He trusted us and just turned us loose,” Ahmad said. “But even before that, those of us coming back had decided that no matter what, we were going to make it to the NCAA Tournament.
“We should’ve gone when we were sophomores, but (the NCAA) wouldn’t let us because we hadn’t been fully accepted as a Division II program yet.”
This time they planned to control their own destiny.
In the process, they forever played a part in the destiny of the program for decades to come.
“Everything has to have a starting point, and our team determined the direction the Wright State program would go,” Grote said as he and Ahmad sat in the MidDay Coffee shop on S. Patterson Blvd. the other day and talked about their former team and the long-awaited celebration that’s going to honor it Sunday at the Nutter Center.
“I think our team set a standard for Wright State basketball.”
The 1975-76 Raiders went 14-0 at home that year.
“Only three Wright State teams have gone undefeated at home in the history of the program,” Ahmad said.
In finishing the year 20-8, the Raiders were the first team in program history to win 20 games in a season.
They became the first WSU team ever to make the NCAA Tournament, qualifying for the Division II Regional in Evansville.
The Raiders were led by four players, each of whom would end up scoring over 1,000 points in their WSU careers.
Schaefer tallied 1,634 points, which remains ninth among career scorers at WSU.
Falknor finished with 1,416 points, now 17th on the list of all-time scorers. Grote is 16th with 1,406 points and Ahmad is 25th with 1,182.
Ahmad was the first African American ever to receive a basketball scholarship to Wright State.
Freshman teammate Alan McGee graduated summa cum laude from Wright State, became the first African American in the WSU School of Medicine and spent over 33 years as a much acclaimed spinal surgeon in his hometown of Fort Wayne
Grote became the first All-American at Wright State and the first Raider athlete ever to sign a pro contract when he joined the New York Mets organization which drafted him as a 12th round pitcher.
As that team reached new heights both on the court and off, the public started to take notice.
“When I’d played at Alter, I remember we filled UD Arena three times for our games and Channel 7 broadcast some of them,” Schaefer said. “I can remember my first game at Wright State. We came running into the P.E. Building and there wasn’t anybody there.
“But by the end of the season the place was filling up and in seasons to come it was packed and noisy and everybody was into it.
“I look at that (1975-76) team as the one that kicked off Wright State basketball in so many ways.”
Ahmad agreed: “We became a cornerstone for Wright State basketball.”
Yet, for all its historical significance, the team had received little recognition over the past 50 years. It may have something to do with the school’s messy split with Jackson who was fired after three years. Or it might just have been a philosophical switch to focus on the future, not the past.
Regardless, Ahmad, more than any of his teammates, made it a mission in recent years to get the team recognized and, at times, he pressed school administrators to do so.
Sunday the team finally will get its due.
Before the Raiders’ 5 p.m. tip off against Green Bay, the hoopsters of a half century past will be honored at a dinner in the Berry Room of the Nutter Center. At halftime the team will be brought out onto the court.
Throughout the day there will be plenty of stories, some likely altered by distant memory, and one image – as Falknor noted with a laugh – skewered by self-serving eyesight:
“When they sent out a photo of the team the other day, I messaged back, ‘Well, I see one good looking guy on there.’
“And two or three of the guys messaged me back and said, ‘Thank you!’”
‘I’ll never forget that smell’
When Grote was coming out of Elder High in Cincinnati, he, like Schaefer a few years later, wanted to play both basketball and baseball in college.
As the recruiting process wore on, he narrowed his choices to two schools – Rollins in Florida and Wright State – both of whom agreed he could play both sports.
Rollins athletic director was Ed Jucker, the former Cincinnati Bearcats basketball coach and he was partial to Cincinnati athletes.
Grote and three other Elder athletes planned to go to Rollins and the other three did.
“My scholarship offer got lost in the mail,” Grote said. “If it had come through, I would have gone to Rollins. But when it didn’t — and since it already was summer — I signed with Wright State.”
Falknor, who described himself as “a farm boy from New Madison,” said he wanted to stay close to home.
Ahmad. who had starred at Middletown High, wanted to play at nearby Miami University but said he was told no more guard spots were open.
At Wright State, Falknor said, “We were like The Three Musketeers.”
Regardless of a fancy moniker, there was nothing lavish when it came to the trappings of WSU basketball in those early years.
“When we first got there (in the fall of 1972) the PE Building wasn’t done yet, so we used to practice late at night at Stebbins High, after all their teams were done,” Grote said.
“Or at the fairgrounds in Xenia,” Ahmad added.
“And because we practiced so late, there was no place open to eat so they made us sandwiches for after practice,” Grote said.
Brown once bemoaned that fact to me: “I’ll never forget that smell. The sandwiches were kept in brown paper bags, so the van always smelled like salami.”
“And the pickle loaf, I hated that,” Grote said.
Ahmad said the one allowance they got was $15 for laundry … a month!
Yet, while some might see what was lacking, Falknor said there also were unexpected positives: “The van rides to and from practice helped bond us as a team.”
Schaefer talked about the senior players accepting him and the other freshmen when they joined the team:
“They brought us all in and made us a team right from the get-go. The leaders were Ricky Martin, Lyle and Grote and they said, ‘C’mon, let’s play.’ And we became a unit, a team real quick.”
The Raiders had several other players of note:
Curt Shellabarger was from Celina and had gone to the University of Florida before coming back home and Bob Cook was from Miamisburg.
Grote said the late Steve Shook originally was from the Boston area and had played at Northeastern.
Neil Reif came from Indian Hill High in Cincinnati; Dan Huguely was from Dayton Roosevelt, as was Donald Person, who left the team after a semester. Guy Conners came from Amelia; Ken Millisor from Fairfield Union; and Edgar Johnson, another early departee, was from Warren.
After a season-opening victory over Oakland, the Raiders went to Cincinnati to play the No. 6 Bearcats at Armory Fieldhouse and were roughed up, 118-70.
The team then won eight of its next nine games and that included a rousing comeback against Cleveland State at the PE Building. Down by 20 with 10 minutes left, WSU won 89-85.
Eventually they got the long-awaited invite and were sent to the NCAA Tournament’s Division II Regional in Evansville to play the host Purple Aces, who had made the tournament four of the past six seasons and won the national crown five years earlier.
‘20 Wins…NCAA Tournament’
Each Raider has a memory from the Evansville game, but none are quite like Schaefer’s who pushed through rising emotion as he told his story.
“I don’t remember the game as much as I do one person who was there,” he said. “Evansville had brought Keith Moon in on a recruiting trip. We’d played against each other. He was at Fairmont West.
“We talked and he asked me about playing Division II basketball and what I thought of Evansville.
“I told him it was a great place.”
Schaefer’s voice broke as he remembered the conversation: “Well, you know what happened.”
The 6-foot-8 Moon joined the Purple Aces and was a sophomore backup center on the team that boarded a DC-3 flight on December 13,1977 to go play Middle Tennessee.
Just 90 seconds after takeoff, the plane crashed, killing all 29 people on board.
Against such devastating loss losing a game to the Aces 21 months earlier seems pretty trivial.
At the time though, such future devastation was inconceivable.
All the Wright State players knew during their game was that despite setbacks – Shellabarger missed the game with tonsilitis; Ahmad tore cartilage in his toe midway through the game, but with some heavy bandaging he continued to play – the game was tied, 75-75, with 2:17 left.
Ahmad fouled out and the Raiders never scored again. They did beat St. Joseph’s in the consolation game the next day.
The day Grote graduated he signed with the Mets and then played four years of minor league baseball. He eventually returned to WSU as an assistant baseball and basketball coach and later served as a color commentator on basketball broadcasts.
Falknor became a hall of fame high school coach, taking Greenon High to the state title game and then having a long and successful career at Bellevue High.
After college Ahmad was everything from an assistant basketball coach at Fairborn Baker High to a yoga instructor and eventually worked with Dayton Parks and Recreation, the YMCA and the juvenile courts system.
Schaefer spent 43 years with Reynolds and Reynolds, retiring as one of the company’s top executives.
The other day as they were comparing there sometimes barebones college experience to the NIL times of today’s athletes, Grote said, “But we did get a nice perk for playing at Wright State. We got a free education.”
“And it was a good education,” Ahmad added.
As he thought about those days he remembered how – just as that wheelchair scene had delivered a message to Schaefer – they all had gotten a directive from another wheeled carrier that season.
He said when Marcus Jackson took over as coach, he’d roll out the rack of basketballs for practice and on it each day he affixed a homemade sign.
It presented the new, never-before reached team goals for the year:
“20 Wins…NCAA Tournament.”
The Raiders achieved both that season and Sunday they finally will be celebrated for that.
“I can’t wait,” Ahmad said. “Sunday is gonna be a blast!”
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