An interview with Will Schanz

From left: Doug, Schanz (note bloodied feet), Kenny and Omar

Ooooof. This was inevitable, I guess. Will Schanz. Blog. Pandemic Papers interview. Yeah. It’s a natural. Words. A lot of words. During his four years here as a proud and loyal member of the Running Red Foxes, Will Schanz (Class of 2013) wore us out. He wore us all out. With words. A lot of words. Schanz can talk. And talk. And talk. Schanz talked so much, he talked DURING his races! True story. But as is often the case, what you complain about as annoying is actually far from it. When Schanz left, we missed him. The van rides got quieter. The bus rides got quieter. Everything got quieter. And yes, we lost a lot as a result. Here’s a long-ago blog post that gives you an idea of what it was like to endure three days of a Schanz-induced haze of words on a trip to Richmond. Fond memories!

From what I can recall, Schanz did not attend Marist College with the intention of becoming a teacher in the NYC school system. But that’s what he’s doing, and we’re proud of him for that, and for the fact that he is yet another branch on the coaching tree. I’ll admit that we haven’t stayed that much in touch since his graduation, which I find surprising and a little sad. I figured my post-Schanz years would be filled with long phone calls and longer emails. But alas, as often happens, our busy lives have drifted our own ways, only to intersect with random texts or emails, often centered around his legendary high school coach at Shaker. Coach Springstead has coached thousands of runners over a decades-long career; I think he’s nearing or has surpassed 60 years holding a stopwatch and a clipboard. Whenever I see him, he always remembers me and always asks about Will Schanz. Again, out of the thousands of athletes he has mentored, Schanz always comes to the old man’s mind. Today, the same can be said for this not-as-old man. Enjoy this endless run-on sentence of a Pandemic Papers interview with the one and only Will Schanz.

Let’s go way back in time: How and why did you choose Marist? What other schools were you considering?

Marist was pretty much my top choice from the jump! I knew that I wanted a liberal arts school because I was pretty confident I would study history (wasn’t sure about the teaching part at that point), and I knew I wanted a school that would take me on as a walk-on. Chris Vanzetta and I visited Marist together our senior year and I think we both walked away feeling pretty confident we both wanted to go there. (A side note to that day -- I got pulled over and received my first speeding ticket ever as we were trying to leave the Marist campus because Route 9 right around Marist is the world’s biggest speed trap! Who would have known only a couple years later I would become one of the team’s official van drivers …) 

But in all seriousness, I got along with Pete and the team right from the start. Chris Vanzetta and I knew Nick Webster from Shaker, which made us feel more comfortable right from the start and he only had great things to say about the school since he had left Shaker. I also want to give Pat Duggan a ton of credit in convincing me to come because he was another history major and he had such glowing things to say about the school. The only other school I seriously considered was Geneseo, but that school really never held the same kind of appeal for me for whatever reason.

Talk a little bit about your high school career. How and why did you start running? You ran for a true living legend at Shaker High School. What was that like and are you still in touch with Coach Springstead and others from your high school track teammates?

**Cracks fingers** Oh, so I can talk about Shaker now? Just joking -- I’ll keep my Shaker soliloquy brief. I actually started running because the sport I was actually trying to put the most time into my 9th and 10th grade year of high school was basketball. I didn’t make the basketball team my 9th grade year, and I was determined that if I just got in ridiculously good running shape and just worked on my jump shot a lot, that things would go better my 10th grade year. So I joined XC my 10th grade year.

Running sucked at the beginning! Lord almighty, am I not a naturally talented runner (Editor’s note: Agreed!). Shaker was loaded at that point, and when I say I was at the back of the pack every day at practice that year, I mean I was at the back of the freaking pack! But I worked hard, and I started to see results. I remember by the last couple races of that season I started to see huge decreases in my times because I was starting to learn how to race. And most importantly for me, I started to just really enjoy hanging out with the XC guys. They were weirdos, just as I was. Additionally, I learned quickly that running is one of the handful of sports that for many of the practices, you can just speak while working out…

So at that point I just stuck with running. I know I can go on and on, but it’s hard for me to put in words what Springstead meant to my life. Running was really the first thing that gave my life a lot of direction and purpose, and Springstead was a legendary orchestrator of a team that I will forever be bonded to. Many of my closest friends still come from that team. And we were just good! Springstead worked us hard, but there was never a moment of questioning what he asked of us. I mean, I was on the team celebrating his 50th year coaching, so you knew he had done a few good things right along the way.

Talk a bit about your collegiate running career. What are some of your fondest memories as a student-athlete at Marist?

I suppose I’ll start with the unspectacular part of my Marist career -- the actual running part of it. I definitely grew so much as a runner under you Pete, and I will forever be grateful for your tutelage and how flexible you were as a coach. But yeah, I came on as a walk-on and left as one. I was, as you would put it, “a grinder.” The longer the distance the better for me, and I was down to hammer those miles as much as I needed to. But, it probably sums up my career best that I would usually have my best race each year at the very unassuming Vassar May invitational in which we would typically line up, at most, 5-6 runners for the 10k under the lights.

The highlight of Marist for me was the team. Particularly early on in my career, we had SUCH big characters on the team that it literally felt like there was never a dull moment. We had practices that would be intense, caf sessions that would last for hours and would be hilarious, and even late-night Jerk Squad that probably distracted us from our papers a little too long. The team was, and forever will be, my family. It’s why even at the age of 29, I still find myself living with Marist track guys. It’s hard for me to imagine my life without so many of those guys.

What was your major in Marist? Were you considering going into teaching or did your career path veer that way unexpectedly?

I majored in History-Education and minored in Psychology. If I’m remembering correctly, I actually don’t think I declared the education part until my junior year. I was always really unsure about the education part because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to devote my career to one in the classroom, or focus on writing. I have a family that has a diverse background in writing, and I have always felt a comfort with writing. But I guess, ultimately, I decided to at least start with teaching because that way I thought I could maybe coach track and teach young people a subject I really love.

What is your current teaching position, how long have you been there and how did you get involved in teaching in the NYC schools?

This is my seventh year teaching in NYC schools. I first taught at the Bronx Leadership Academy II in the South Bronx for two years. For the last five years, I have taught at the Young Women’s Leadership School of the Bronx (also in the South Bronx). They are both public NYC DOE schools. The school I currently teach at is very unique (for even the country) because it is a single-sex all girls public school. NYC gave a waiver to five of these schools back in the 1980s and it still applies today. I currently teach Global 9 Regents, Global 10 Regents, and AP World History.

OK, here we go: Distance learning and distance teaching are a challenge for students and teachers. Discuss how it’s going, what the mammoth challenges are like, what you’ve learned, what you’d like to change, all it it?

I decided to respond to these questions after my students took the AP test because my responses would have been far too cranky while I still had the pressure of AP exams lingering over my head while quarantined. I will say this at the top: I am incredibly proud of everything my school and my students have been able to accomplish in these tremendously difficult times. All of us have made the best out of an incredibly crappy situation.

But in short -- this experience sucks. Online learning is not and cannot ever be the solution for education. Students need the socialization that comes with school. Teachers need the socialization that comes with school. Humans are social creatures. We learn through our connections with one another (the good, the bad, and the ugly).

This has been particularly brutal for the community I teach in. We have had dozens of confirmed instances where a student has lost either a parent, a grandparent, or some other relative from this. The Bronx has suffered badly. This has been a traumatizing event. That is why I have been very frustrated by people’s dismissal of this as time has gone on. I have students of my own that have middle aged parents who have passed away from this. People that state outright that they aren’t worried about it are coming from a place of privilege. Communities that were ravaged, like the Bronx, is because many of these parents do not have comfy white-collar jobs that allow them to work from home. They make up the subway workers, the grocery store workers, the nurses, the policemen, the postal carriers of NYC.

So right there is challenge #1. Right off the bat, our school staff has moved from being educators to being, in a sense, makeshift social workers. We have students who we check in on frequently just to see that they and their family are doing OK. Because as we are all aware now, this is not just a health crisis at this point. This is an economic crisis as well. And so, there are just tremendous overall strains that are taking place, which is adding more stress to the situation. So as you begin to think about that, you start to consider what kind of mental state a lot of our kids are in as they are attempting to learn online, which really is the stalest possible form of learning.

Challenge #2: The logistics of online learning in a largely disadvantaged community. I am very fortunate to be teaching in a school with an incredibly responsive administration. We loaned out well over 200 laptops and iPads to students once schools shut down. And even that wasn’t enough. NYC has been fortunate enough to get a hold of other iPads that our students can borrow. But that took weeks for a lot of our students to get a hold of. So we had a good chunk of students beginning a bit behind, which further frustrates the situation. And then there is a challenge if students even have reliable WiFi (or even WiFi at all).

Challenge #3: Moving an entire curriculum that was meant to be in person and interactive to a place of online learning. During normal times, I can’t even picture a single lesson I have in which there isn’t some kind of group work going on at least once during the lesson. So to just scrap years of lessons in a matter of days and move it to a place where we learn together online has been a tremendously time consuming task for me. And unfortunately, what it means is that a lot of lessons have become much more static as they have become very teacher-focused and students have to listen to me (this probably comes as a shock to those who knew me at Marist, but I would much rather hear their voices than my own in my classroom).

Challenge #4: There are just a solid chunk of students who are just checked out. And it’s for a lot of various reasons. But they are just checked out and it is probably likely that we won’t get them fully back until we fully return to school. A quote I got from one of my favorite students was that “all this has done is taken away the best parts of school, and only left intact the worst parts of it.” That would be a correct statement.

Challenge #5: There still was an AP exam that was ridiculously challenging and I had to guide 18 extremely stressed out students to that day. I still think they did well, but the College Board certainly made it as stressful as humanly possible. If you have any interest in the world of education, just do a google search of “College Board” and you will see about 10 different ways College Board made this process one giant headache for everyone.

Challenge #6: The future isn’t exactly hopeful. Teachers can’t even plan for next year because we have no idea what’s going to happen next year! There’s a good chance we’re still doing online learning next year. And on top of that, our already underfunded school district is probably about to be more underfunded as severe budget cuts are coming for public schools.

I could expound AT LENGTH about each of these items. But what I know for certain is that online learning is no way to educate young people. Teaching has been one of the more rewarding experiences of my life and this has really felt like it has just made it not fun for anyone anymore.

(this was me receiving a Keurig machine for my classroom last year as a gift from my AP students. I figure you would appreciate that)

Where do you live in the city, how long have you been at home (out of the city) and what are your short-term plans (when do you plan to move back down to the city)?

I live in the Upper East Side. During the quarantine, I’ve been living in Albany with my parents just because it was more space. Probably going to get back to the city soon though.

Other than the obvious work-related challenges, how else has the Covid-19 pandemic affected your life?

I honestly have felt like I am actually working more during all of this (for the various reasons stated above). I haven’t spent this time with my family though in years, so that has been one silver lining I suppose out of all of this.

What do you envision for the short- and long-term future regarding the pandemic on all levels: Work, family, personal, colleges and universities, etc.?

I truly don’t know. What I think MOST people have realized is that learning online cannot substitute an education that takes place in a classroom. But what I fear is that there are leaders who side with *reformers* who believe that what we are enduring right now is the future of education. And in addition to that, there will be politicians who see this as a way to further cut spending to education.

My biggest thing right now, is that I am worried most about people (and there are many it seems at this point) who believe this was overblown. There is a thought out there that the restrictions we put in place were too draconian. I don’t think we’ll be able to return to normal until a vaccine comes through, but my fear is that if any kind of second wave comes through that it will be much tougher to get people to respond to holding too restrictions because there are people who genuinely believe this was all overblown. And it’s unfortunate because it comes from a section of people who have been exclusively sheltered in their own immediate community, and choose not to listen to communities other than their own immediate one.

What type of post-collegiate running have you done and what are you doing in terms of running (if anything?) currently?

Haha, it is a very much here-and-there kind of situation. I was actually actively coaching in my early days at my first school, and we had some really talented runners come out of there. But my focus at this school has been more of the teaching side. I’ve been helping out with the girls track team where I can, and will go on runs with them on occasion. But at the moment, running is simply an outlet and something I do to enjoy myself. My competitive days, at least at the moment, have been put on hold.

My life plan has always kind of been to really crank back up in my 30s to try out half marathons and maybe marathons, so we’ll see if that happens…

As you know, our senior class was robbed of their final season (outdoor track) as well as their final few months as college student-athletes. What message or thoughts can you send to them?

This sucks. However, as pretty much everyone else has noted in these past interviews, those bonds you all made are very real. It really is cliche, but it’s true. The memories and friendships you have made will last your entire life. Continue to stay close with them. I think we’ve all seen from this that it is our connections with our friends and family that are helping us to stay sane, and it is amazing how quickly we realize we miss seeing everyone as soon as that opportunity is taken away from us.