Abington Friends boys' basketball coach Steve Chadwin to retire after 40 years

Josh Leopold has seen it often over the years, but Steve Chadwin’s reaction when things go wrong for their Abington Friends boys' basketball team still makes him chuckle.

Chadwin, the 40-year coach at the Jenkintown school, will stomp his feet and pull his hair. He will swing his arms and pace the sideline.

“It could be the most intense moment," Leopold, Chadwin’s former player and current assistant coach, said last week,"but I just end up laughing.”

Soon, however, the laughter will stop. Chadwin, 73, plans to retire at the end of this season, after leading the Kangaroos to 16 Friends School League championships, including eight straight from 1990 to 1997, and a 646-301 record, including an 8-6 mark this season. The Kangaroos will play Westtown on Friday.

“I think it’s the right time for a change in the leadership in the boys’ basketball program,” said Chadwin, a member of the Philadelphia Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. “After 40 years, I think the program needs a new face, a new voice, just like anything else.”

Chadwin might be gone from the sidelines after this season, but there is no way he’ll be forgotten. Abington Friends is building an athletic center with a basketball court that is scheduled to open for the 2019-20 school year, and the court will be named the Chadwin Stauffer Court in honor of Chadwin and former girls’ basketball coach Debbie Stauffer.

“Steve has had an extraordinary career here,” Abington Friends head of school Rich Nourie said. “There’s a tradition in basketball of naming a court after somebody who has had that kind of tenure, commitment, and success. So I think … that it feels really appropriate for Steve.”

Chadwin was also honored in 2017 as a “high school legend” by the Coaches vs. Cancer organization.

He also has taught middle school physical education for 40 years and coached baseball and softball at the middle-school and high-school levels.

A graduate of Germantown High and East Tennessee State, Chadwin said he knew he wanted to be a teacher and coach sports since he was a teenager. When he was 16, Chadwin attended Camp Olympia, a youth basketball camp in Bucks County that was directed by Jack McCloskey, the former Penn men’s basketball coach and NBA coach and executive.

McCloskey, known as “Trader Jack” in NBA circles for the deals he made to improve the Detroit Pistons in the 1980s, served as a role model, Chadwin said. McCloskey left such an impression on Chadwin at the camp that it influenced the way he ran his program at Abington Friends.

“I tried to use the game of basketball ... to teach life lessons to young people growing up in high school to become better people,” Chadwin said. “I just love coaching the game, and that was my goal all of the time.

“Sure, you want to win games. You want to win Friends School League championships and things like that. But, it’s more important to me to coach things and let them learn life lessons.”

Chadwin was Leopold’s physical education teacher in grade school and his basketball coach in high school. Chadwin shared plenty of basketball knowledge, Leopold said, and steered him in the right direction off the court.

Leopold said he considered switching majors from physical education to business when he was a sophomore at Temple University. But first, he sought Chadwin’s advice, and his former coach convinced him to stick with teaching. Eventually, the two worked together. Leopold now teaches grade-school physical education and health at Abington Friends.

“I couldn’t ask for anything better than what he’s given me,” Leopold said. “He’s basically like a father figure to me.”

John Owens, the new boys' basketball coach at Penn Charter, also played under Chadwin and worked as his assistant coach.

As for retirement, Chadwin said he’ll miss helping Abington Friends students develop as players and people. But he hopes to stay involved with basketball, and he looks forward to spending more time with his wife, Sherrea; daughter Jessica; son, Jamie; and four grandchildren (a fifth is on the way). Sherrea Chadwin coached the Germantown Academy girls' basketball team from 1977 to 1981, and Jessica was a lacrosse star at GA.

Chadwin’s grandkids call him “G-Chad,” said Jamie Chadwin, the boys’ basketball coach at Radnor.

Jamie Chadwin said he talks to his father every day about basketball, and he wouldn’t be surprised to see his father as an adviser to a team next season.

“It’s what’s in our DNA,” Jamie Chadwin said. “He’s a teacher. I think he’ll have no shortage of opportunities to do that.”