Whitefish’s Schwaderer selected as Coach of the Year

Over the last decade, the Whitefish tennis program has been making moves.

This year both the boys and girls teams placed second at the state tournament and their success didn’t go unnoticed. The Montana Coaches Association recently announced the recipients of the Coach of the Year award for spring sports and the Bulldog boys head coach Chris Schwaderer was honored with the award for Class A boys tennis.

Schwaderer said he was appreciative of the award, but gives equal recognition to the entire program and all of the coaching staff for both the boys and girls.

“I feel like I owe a lot to the coaches that I work with and the program in general,” he said. “There’s a lot of people that make this team what it is that put us in this position to do well, I want everyone to get credit for that.”

Schwaderer took over as head coach of the boys team 10 years ago. He grew up in Michigan and came to Montana in 1992 for graduate school. He is a high school English teacher and started teaching in Whitefish in 2000.

Schwaderer was first the Whitefigh girls track coach for a handful of years and later switched to the boys tennis team. He says he loves coaching tennis and getting to stay active with the high schoolers.

“I love tennis because it gives me the chance to still get out there and play with the kids,” Schwaderer said. “One of my favorite things about coaching tennis is being able to hit every single day and jump in and play some doubles with the kids. It keeps me active and in the game and connected with everybody.”

Since he became the boys head coach, he has been working diligently with the rest of the coaching staff to build the program into a competitive force in Class A tennis. By receiving this award, Schwaderer says it shows that teams around the state are recognizing Whitefish’s success over the years.

“It makes me feel really good because we’ve been working hard at building this program up for a decade,” Schwaderer explained. “In the last several years we’ve just had more and more success; it just tells me that my fellow tennis coaches around the state see the success. They feel that we’ve got a good program here and they recognize me as being a part of it.”

Schwaderer expressed that the program has grown as he’s encouraged kids in the high school to come out for the tennis team each spring. He says they had enough kids interested this year, 25 to be exact, to have more than two teams.

When Schwaderer first came on as the head coach, the Bulldogs had little success at the state tournament each year. Now over the last three full seasons, the boys have nabbed the state title once and second place twice. And the girls have been equally as successful.

“We’re kind of like one big happy family — we like each other, we support each other and it takes time,” he said. “It’s taken 10 years to develop it into something that’s appealing for a lot of different kids and I think it really lends itself to the success that we’ve had.”

This year in particular Schwaderer was proud of the team he had the opportunity to coach. The Bulldogs took six players to the state tournament, which was the most that had ever qualified for state before. Schwaderer says receiving the MCA Coach of the Year Award has quite a bit to do with this year’s talented team.

“I have to owe it a lot to the team... we’re just so deep, we’ve got a lot of talent and a lot of hard working kids,” he said. “We had a lot of parity, a lot of players who were very equal in ability and I think we got the most out of them.”

And Schwaderer says the future looks bright for the Bulldogs who are going to ride the momentum from the last few years as they continue to build the program.

“Looking down the road it looks like we’re just going to keep reloading — which is good, it’s better to reload than rebuild,” he said.