Schultz steps away after 20 years

Things will look a lot different in the weight room at Tippecanoe High School. Greg Schultz has retired after 20 years in charge of strength and conditioning of the Tippecanoe athletes.

Schultz, who grew up in Pleasant Hill, has been a staple in helping to prepare the local athletes to become the best athletes they can be.

“Twenty years sounds like a long time, but it has felt like time has flown by and hasn’t seemed very long at all,” Schultz said. “Taking time to look back on all the athletes, coaches, wins, and memories in the weight room has been very eye opening.”

Schultz attended Miami for his undergraduate degree and then graduated from graduate school to be a physical therapist in Virginia from 1999-2002. He got his first job in Frederick, Maryland, from 2002-2004.

“My wife (Mindy) and I decided we were ready to start our own family and wanted to be back closer to home, so I started looking at PT openings in the area,” he said. “I was getting ready to accept a position at a small outpatient facility in Troy when I got a call saying this position was open. I could be the strength coach at Tipp as well as be a PT at the Hyatt Center.”

“I didn’t really know what the strength coach position would entail. I knew I wanted to be involved in sports and working with high school athletes sounded like what I was looking for.”

When Schultz took the job with the Red Devils, he first had to make the big move from the old high school into the new building.

“I came in and spent the last two weeks with the high school at the old location and then helped move everything over to the current location,” he said. “At the time, the new weight room seemed huge. Tipp only had about 13 kids that summer from the football team coming to workouts, and it seemed like there was a lot of space. I spent the next couple weeks following the UD strength coach around, trying to get a feel for what the environment should feel and look like.” I knew from the early days that Tipp athletes needed to be trained a little different than other schools as we never seemed to have the biggest kids. I knew we needed to focus on teaching explosiveness, quickness, and mobility, which would help keep our injury numbers low and allow us to play fast in all of our sports. To see us go from our biggest competition/rivalries being against West Milton, Bellefontaine, and Tecumseh to now having our biggest rivalries against Troy, Butler, Piqua, and Sidney without our class size growing much at all over the last 20 years has been pretty awesome to see.”

Schultz has been around a lot of quality athletes, including all-Ohio players and state champions. He noted that Tipp athletics are just different than most places because all they do is compete and win.

“We have always had a lot of success in all of our sports programs at Tipp,” he said. “Most schools have periods of down years, and then a good class comes along, and the sport will be successful for a year or two until that class graduates. At Tipp, the one thing that remained constant despite new classes coming in every year is we would always be competing for league championships and making runs in the postseason.”

“I was just there to make sure kids had access to the weight room and work on getting stronger, faster, and ready to compete at their best. I wanted to make sure that if the team was only in the weight room for 30-40 minutes, the athletes would not be standing around. Our programs moved kids in stations through the weight room and eventually into our hallways because we have too many kids to fit in the weight room at one time.”

His memories with the athletic department are too numerous to mention. But he did go through some of his biggest memories he will always take with him as he gets older.

“The teams that stand out to me the most over the last 20 years at Tipp start out with our great basketball teams in 2006 and 2007 with Robert Goldsberry, Kellen Zawadzki, Kyle Corbin, Kyle Weber and David Strawser,” Schultz said. “Two straight 20-0 seasons and getting to work with Coach Pond at that time was a lot of fun. The three undefeated football teams in school history stand out in 2007, 2013 and this year in 2024. Those three teams all had generational athletes that loved to compete and the best coaches in the entire area.”

“Obviously the 2022 team that went to the Final Four was so much fun to be a part of. My overall favorite football team was in 2023 though. I had coached those seniors since third grade in 2014, as my son Peyton was a part of that class. To see them come in after the magical 2022 season when nobody thought we would be able to be successful after losing all the seniors and starting out the season on a bad note with an opening game loss. But, then watching those kids respond and buy into the culture that Coach Burgbacher has built and go 10-3 was pretty awesome as a coach and a dad.”
“I have also had the pleasure of working with a State Final Four volleyball team, some unbelievable girls basketball teams, and of course our soccer programs for both girls and boys are unmatched in this area and have been for a long time.”

Another humbling moment for Schultz was the respect he received from the student athletes who wanted to enter his field after graduation.

“It has also been very rewarding to have many of the athletes over the last 20 years tell me they wanted to do what I was doing as their job choice. They would come in to follow me as I was treating patients and go on to PT school,” he said. “Some of those athletes are now leading their own careers in PT and coaching their own kids now. I always enjoy running into alumni out and about in the community. We will often talk about certain workouts or times in the weight room where they thought they were not going to make it, or that they were so sore they couldn’t get out of bed the next day.”

“But they always say the same thing, which is they are so thankful they went through that. It helped them to become the person they are to this day. That is what means the most to me.”

For now, Schultz will continue to support the Red Devils with younger children coming up through the system, while he will still be there as needed at the Hyatt Center. He feels the athletes at Tipp will be in good hands and continue to succeed.

“Tipp athletics is going to continue being just as successful if not more successful in the future,” he said. “We have amazing coaches, the best Athletic Director around, and kids at Tipp haven’t changed in terms of being genuine and coachable kids in the last 20 years. So I don't expect that to change anytime soon.”

“I will continue working with the athletes if they have injuries and need rehab at the Tipp's Hyatt Center, the Center for Sports Medicine. I am invested in Tipp athletics for at least the next eight years with Carson and Braxton getting their opportunities to play, so I don't plan on missing many sporting events.”