The Oregon Twilight meet was the setting for the breakthrough performance Brian Schaudt yearned for and the Duck men needed.
“I came into it pretty tired so I was a little worried, but when I was warming up, I was feeling really good,” the sophomore from Philomath said. “On my first jump, my speed was really good. I felt good, so I let it all hang.”
Schaudt sped through the runway and triple-jumped his way to a lifetime best of 49 feet 7 1/4 inches. He attempted one more jump and fouled before assistant head coach Robert Johnson told him his day was done. No matter. Schaudt had won the event and gained a major confidence boost.
“He’s been jumping well all year, except for he’s been scratching every weekend,” said Johnson, a two-time triple jump All-American at Appalachian State. “He’s had a scratch here and a scratch there, and he was finally able to get one in. It was definitely good for him to get one in that actually counted and show his potential.”
As the No. 2 Oregon men continue their quest for a fourth straight Pacific-10 Conference title, every possible point in competition matters. Schaudt, whose previous personal-best jump of 48 feet 9 inches won him the 2008 Oregon state championship, has the athletic upside that can benefit the Ducks immediately. His Twilight jump is the eighth-best among Pac-10 athletes this season, and Johnson sees the potential for greater things.
Schaudt is a polite, soft-spoken individual who stands out in other ways — namely, height. The “gentle giant,” as Johnson affectionately refers to him, is the tallest athlete on the Oregon track team at 6 feet 6 inches and one of the tallest male athletes in any sport. His mother, Carol, is 6 feet 4 inches and a former Oregon State basketball star; his father, Ken, the mayor of Philomath, is an even 6 feet.
Brian Schaudt’s size, however, belies a quickness and athleticism perfectly suited to the horizontal jumps, where speed must be built up in a hurry.
Schaudt’s work ethic, cultivated in high school, shows he takes pride in the craft of the triple jump.
“Brian, in order to study this, would get on YouTube and watch these Olympic-level athletes triple-jumping,” Carol Schaudt said. “He would slow it down, and then look at his video. He really studied.”
Most jumpers — really, most track athletes — don’t possess the sheer size Schaudt has, so Johnson works with him on keeping his body in line with the activity.
“He’s getting two out of six jumps, and so we work a lot on his approach and a lot on his balance,” Johnson said. “He’s a little tall and gangly and doesn’t quite have a good control over his limbs.”
Perhaps the Twilight meet was an indication of things to come, the first sign of a late-bloomer who could add that extra competitive dimension to the distance-focused men. Blooming late, like size, runs in the family.
In 1977, Carol Schaudt was in her third year at Linn-Benton Community College in Corvallis when a women’s basketball team was formed. The head coach, Line-Benton baseball coach Dave Dangler, spotted her on campus and convinced her to try out for the team. Seven did, and all seven made it.
“I had not really played much. In high school, it was more like a P.E. class,” Carol Schaudt said. “Being 6-foot-4 in the ’70s was a huge advantage.”
After one year playing at Linn-Benton, Carol Schaudt was encouraged by Dangler to drive to Oregon State and inquire about a scholarship. The Beavers’ head coach at the time, in her first year with the program, was Aki Hill, a native of Japan who served as a volunteer assistant coach for three years at UCLA under John Wooden. Hill gave Carol Schaudt a partial scholarship and worked her into an All-American who led the nation in field-goal percentage (.750) by her senior year.
“She saw the potential in me that I don’t know anybody had seen,” Carol Schaudt said. “We did a lot of work together, and she’s the one who turned me into a basketball player.”
Carol Schaudt made the United States national team in 1981, expecting her basketball career to end there. But an agent opened her eyes to Italy, which had just allowed foreign-born players in its top women’s basketball league, and she accepted an offer. Carol Schaudt would spend six years in Italy, one of the first American women to play professionally in Europe alongside players such as former Oregon standout Bev Smith.
“There was lots of excitement around it,” Carol Schaudt said. “Being in the first crop of foreigners going over there, it was unknown from the Italian side. It was eye-opening for me to live outside the U.S. It broadened my world considerably.”
In 1984, after the “most stressful two weeks of my life,” Carol Schaudt made the U.S. Olympic team for the Los Angeles games. The U.S. women, on the rise after the nationwide increase and investment in women’s basketball scholarships and training in the 1970s and 1980s, were expected to contend with the heavily favored Soviet Union and East German teams for the gold medal. However, because political tension — the U.S. had boycotted the 1980 Games in Moscow to much uproar — both teams boycotted Los Angeles.
“We prepared just the same. You didn’t know if things were going to change and everyone was going to show up,” Carol Schaudt said. “Because of the boycott, the actual competition was not that strong.”
The U.S. steamrolled its way to the final game, defeating South Korea to take the gold medal in a display of dominance on home soil.
Brian Schaudt has heard the stories and seen the memorabilia. He knows the magnitude of his mother’s accomplishments — and he aspires to that.
“My mom is an amazing woman,” he said. “She’s a big role model for me. I just want to aspire to be as humble as her. That’s what I do every meet, I just try to go out there and have the same competitive attitude and have the same respect for competitors that my mom did.”
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