Happy National Twins Day: Meet college sports' only same-school coaching duo
Friday marks the start of the 40th annual Twins Day Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, where thousands of sets of twins and other multiples will spend a long weekend soaking in one another’s multiplicity. The twins will all dress the same, and they will compete in contests determining which set looks most alike and different.
And even though the world’s largest gathering of twins is held just a half-hour drive from their hometown of Cleveland, neither Dan Schmotzer, who has been a twin for all of his 63 years, nor Dave Schmotzer, who has been a twin for exactly five minutes longer than his brother, plans to attend.
One reason is because, well, that type of thing just ain’t their type of thing.
“You couldn’t pay me to go to one of those things,” Dave said.
“And everything we do, we still do together,” Dan said.
“So we’re not going,” Dave said.
The other reason is because, well, they don’t live so close anymore. The Schmotzer Twins of Cleveland have for more than a quarter-century been the Schmotzer Twins of Coker College, a small Division II school in South Carolina that is home to the only set of identical twin head coaches in college sports.
Dan coaches basketball. Dave coaches baseball. But if it weren’t for a coin flip 40 years ago in a nun’s living room, it could have been the opposite.
The quick story: The twins were pretty much inseparable growing up. They were the best of friends who always knew how to get on each other’s nerves. On their high school baseball team, Dave played shortstop, Dan played second base, and they turned a wicked double play. On the basketball court, their “mental telepathy” gave them a nearly unfair advantage over opponents. (“Seriously – we can be across the country from each other, and we’ll still be thinking and doing the exact same thing,” Dan said.) After graduating from St. Edwards University in Texas, they wanted to be coaches and teachers, and a Cleveland friend hooked the two up with a Catholic school that needed – wouldn’t you know it – a baseball coach and a basketball coach.
They went into Sister Catherine’s dining room. She flipped a coin. Dan won the coin toss.
“What do you want to coach?” the nun said.
“I want basketball,” Dan said.
So Dan became the head basketball coach, with Dave as his assistant. And Dave became the head baseball coach, with Dan as his assistant.
They went from the Catholic high school in Cleveland to Texas Christian University, where the two coached for a decade. They separated for a short while when Dan took the basketball job at Coker and Dave went to a small college in Kentucky.
But wouldn’t you know it – Coker College decided to start a baseball program in the early 1990s, and decided to hire the other Schmotzer to run it.
“We’ve only been separated from birth for only five years if you add it up,” Dan said.
Dan, the basketball coach, is a little more intense than his baseball-coaching brother Dave.
There are differences between them. Dave, the older one, says he’s also the more sophisticated one, and he proves it when he talks about his favorite movie: Denzel Washington’s “Training Day” to Dan’s “Dumb and Dumber.” Dan is more intense, though that may have something to do with the coin flip that made him a basketball coach instead of a more sedate baseball coach.
“It wasn’t something we set out to do – it was just something that happened,” said Dave, the better-looking twin (according to, um, him).
One thing the twins are surely better at than coaching sports: Needling each other.
I spoke with Dan first.
At the end of the conversation, I told him I was about to call his brother, whose office was next door to his at Coker College’s new $12 million arena.
His reply: “Have fun with this fool.”
Then Dave picked up the phone.
“Why didn’t you call me first?” he said. “Now that you found the cure for insomnia talking to my brother, let’s get more interesting.”
Then later, Dave again: “I’m five minutes older. When I came out of my mother’s womb, I got slapped to life. The nurses and the doctors gave me a standing ovation, and they asked my mom, ‘How did she have such a good looking kid?’ Then the next kid comes out. And they slapped my mother and said, ‘How did you have such an ugly kid?’ He was called the ‘Mistake on the Lake.’ ”
It’s all fair game in the world of twins. But when it comes down to it, Dan and Dave know they have created something special by walking side by side in a career dedicated to coaching.
“They are Coker College,” said the school’s athletic director, Lynn Griffin.
“It’s like having two Steve Spurriers or two Lou Holtzes,” Dave said. “We’ve been doing this forever, and we did it together.”
The twins know they could have gone on to supposedly greener pastures. To Division I schools. To places they could have made more money, sought more notoriety. But this place felt … right. Not for one of them. For both of them.
“This has been our UCLA,” said Dave. “This has been our Clemson. This has been our South Carolina. Early on we had aspirations to go Division I, but what does that mean? You’re helping kids cross the river through the great game of basketball, through the great game of baseball. It doesn’t matter where you hang your hat. Where you hang your hat, that’s the place that becomes home.”
Email Reid Forgrave at reidforgrave@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter @reidforgrave.
