Joe Finn serves as archivist for US Lacrosse and the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame and Museum, a role he has held since 1998. As a lifelong Baltimore-area resident, Finn first caught the lacrosse bug in high school and has combined his love for the game and his love of history into becoming one of the foremost authorities on lacrosse.

On April 23, 1962, Austin “Jerry” Schmidt became the first lacrosse player ever featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine. That season, he was concluding his varsity career at Johns Hopkins University and on his way to earning his third All-American honor. In fact, Schmidt was selected as the winner of the Jack Turnbull Award in 1962 as the nation’s most outstanding attackman.

In an article entitled “The Tough Game”, Sports Illustrated described Schmidt as “lacrosse’s dominating force” who was “willing to put a shoulder down and turn the competition into roadkill.” Schmidt, who also played football at Hopkins, was 5’10” and 190 pounds and described as being fast, tough and mean. He scored 93 goals during his three All-America seasons with the Blue Jays.

“The game was different then,” Schmidt said in a follow-up interview with Sports Illustrated in 1998. “Today the sticks are synthetic and totally symmetrical, so players are much more ambidextrous. In my day the sticks were wood, carved by Indians and strung with leather. The ball would come off them different ways from each side. You never really knew how it would fly.”

Schmidt never played club lacrosse after graduation, pursuing instead a career in coaching. He served as head coach at Hobart from 1968 to 1979, and then at Princeton from 1982 to 1987. The national championships that eluded Schmidt as a player at Hopkins eventually came his way at Hobart, where he led the Statesmen to NCAA titles in 1972, 1976 and 1977. He was also selected as the USILA’s national coach of the year in 1977.

“He was one of the finest lacrosse coaches the game's ever had. He took Hobart to another level," said Dave Urick, who succeeded Schmidt as head coach at Hobart. “He could flat-out shoot a lacrosse ball with incredible precision. Not only was he a great scorer, but he was a very physical player. As a coach, all of his emphasis was on a good defense.”

Schmidt’s coaching career also included stints as an assistant coach at Cornell, Navy and Calvert Hall High School in Baltimore. His last coaching stop was at Worcester Country School on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He retired in 1994 and lived in Ocean Pines, Maryland until he passed away in 2004 from complications related to diabetes.

A framed copy of the SI cover was always a fixture in his study, and is also on display in the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame and Museum in Sparks, Md. And why not, since Schmidt was among select company in 1962. Some of the other sports icons that made SI cover appearances that year included Arnold Palmer, Don Drysdale, Mickey Mantle, Sonny Liston and Jack Nicklaus.

“Even back then, being on the cover of Sports Illustrated was a big deal,” said Joe Finn, archivist for US Lacrosse and the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame and Museum. “The interesting thing about the article was that they had to explain the rules of the game. Most readers didn’t really know lacrosse.”

Finn believes that the main stream exposure helped fuel the game’s growth.

“I think being featured in S.I. was a watershed moment for the development of lacrosse,” he said.

Schmidt was inducted into the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 1982, the Hobart College Hall of Fame in 1989, and the Johns Hopkins University Athletic Hall of Fame in 2002.

“The game has given me a lot of high moments," he said in the 1998 SI retrospective. “I dedicated my life to playing, coaching and teaching. But I look at what I have, what I've done, and it was all worth it.”

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