The 1984 Marshfield grad takes over for retiring Bill Zuiker

By Paul Lecker

Sports Reporter

MARSHFIELD — When the basketball season ended for the Marshfield boys team with a sectional semifinal loss to Superior in March, Scott Scheuer said he had no desire to replace the retiring Bill Zuiker as the program’s head coach.

Scheuer, who served three years as an assistant under Zuiker and helped lead the Tigers to a 40-35 overall record and two sectional appearances, was already committed to his many roles.

On top of his job as a physical education and adaptive physical education instructor, Scheuer serves as the high school athletics program’s strength and conditioning coordinator and as an assistant coach for the football and boys basketball teams. To take on the head job might be a little too much.

Or not.

After talking with his family and colleagues, Scheuer decided to throw his hat in the ring for the job, and earlier this week he was officially named as the Marshfield boys basketball program’s next head coach.

“I have a daughter that is going to be a freshman and a son that will be in fifth grade next year, and talking with them and my wife (Michelle), they were saying, ‘Don’t not do this because you think you need to be here with us,’” Scheuer said. “The support of my family was the major obstacle.

“Bill asked me several times during the playoffs if I would be interested, and I kept saying no. I spend so much time in the weight room with the kids during the summer, then football starts, then basketball, … but he said, ‘It really isn’t that much more time than you are already spending here as an assistant.’”

Scheuer contemplated it for a few weeks before deciding he should go for it.

“I was talking with my brother, and he said, ‘Life is really about one thing … timing. Will you ever have this chance again?’ That’s really it.”

Scheuer, 48, graduated from Marshfield High School in 1984, and after continuing his basketball career at the University of Wisconsin-Marshfield, he finished his undergraduate work at UW-La Crosse.

He worked in the Manitowoc School District and used his summers working at Bo Ryan’s basketball camps at UW-Platteville. He served as the head girls basketball coach at the University School of Milwaukee before returning to Marshfield to take a teaching job in 1998.

Scheuer served as an assistant under former coach Gordie Sisson for a few years and returned to the bench in 2012 when Zuiker took over as head coach for Craig Michaelis.

“Bill gave me so much freedom and was always asking me my opinion,” Scheuer said. “He wasn’t all about just doing it his way, and I appreciated that. He is so great at breaking down film, but when we did, we did it separately and talked about it later. I think he wanted me to learn on my own.”

Scheuer hopes to put his own stamp on the Tigers’ program and continue a recent winning tradition. Marshfield had five-straight winning seasons, including a school-record 19 wins in 2013-14, before last season when the Tigers went 8-17. Marshfield did pull off two road wins in the playoffs to reach sectionals for the second year in a row, and Scheuer said he expects the guys coming back to be working hard this summer, especially on their shooting.

“We’ve always played hard on defense. The problem last season was putting the ball in the basket,” Scheuer said. “We are going to run more motion-type stuff and not so many sets. If we need a hoop and we have a shooter on the floor, I want them to be thinking about what to do to get him the ball.”

(Hub City Times Sports Reporter Paul Lecker is also the publisher of MarshfieldAreaSports.com.)