North by Northwestern

Laurie Schiller wants to make one thing clear: he isn’t a farb.

The farbs are the guys who bring the blue coolers out to the fields, the ones with the cell phones stuck in their haversacks.

In the world of Civil War re-enactment, Schiller does his best to be as historically accurate as possible.

“I don’t consider myself a buff — I consider myself a professional,” he said. “Whenever I leave for an event on the weekend, whatever I’ve got in my pack for food is all I’ve got. It’s bacon and hard tack for the weekend.”

He’s not a Tubby Bearded Guy either. The TBGs are the ones that just fall over and die.

“I have little skits that I do. I’ll get mortally wounded in the head and walk around in circles on the battlefield.”

Head Coach Laurie Schiller steps on the battlefield when he has free time. That isn’t often though, because he coaches one of the most dominant women’s fencing teams in the NCAA. 

Since he started coaching in 1978, Schiller has achieved a record of more than 1,000 wins with a .716 win percentage. To put that in perspective, Joe Paterno, one of NCAA football’s winningest coaches, has had 406 wins since 1966.  

“I’ll be honest, I was a mediocre fencer in my career but, you know, there’s a lot of NBA coaches who never played professional basketball,” Schiller said. “Coaching comes down to motivation and teaching. I’m very patient and I don’t believe in yelling at kids for making mistakes. I believe in fixing those mistakes."

When Schiller arrived on campus in 1977 to get a Ph.D. in history, an accidental encounter with a French graduate student who taught fencing classes led him to get involved in Northwestern’s fencing culture.

After a two-year stint abroad, Schiller returned to find that the small fencing classes he helped teach turned into a “varsity club team.” In those days that meant no scholarships, but it did mean having the ability to play in the NCAA.

No scholarships meant it was difficult for Schiller to recruit experienced fencers. He had to build his team from the ground up.            

“For three years, I coached for nothing basically, but we started beating people,” he said.

It wasn’t until 1998 that the women’s fencing team was awarded scholarships. That’s when a shift occurred: Schiller now had more recruiting power.

“We always had some kids who knew how to fence because Northwestern draws those types of people,” Schiller said. “But we did train a lot of inexperienced fencers through classes.”

After getting scholarships, however, Schiller could go after the top-level athletes, or the “stars,” as Schiller puts it.

In 34 years, Schiller has had only one losing season and has built one of the most respected fencing programs in the NCAA.

No, Laurie Schiller isn’t a farb. He wants to make that clear. He’s built a fencing program from the ground up, but he continues to look forward.

“I want to be the top right now,” he said. “To do that, I have to find the extra edge.”