By the time the Regina Pats had played their last game of the 2025-26 Western Hockey League season, assistant coach Ken Schneider had decided it was time for family to come first.
The Pats were eliminated from this year’s playoffs April 4 with a 5-4 overtime loss to the Medicine Hat Tigers and Schneider announced his retirement earlier this week after five seasons on the bench supporting head coaches John Paddock and Brad Herauf.
“I think probably the biggest thing was that I’m starting to find it’s pretty difficult in terms of the travel just with my age if I’m being completely honest,” Schneider, 64, said in an interview with SportsCage.com.
“The other thing that stands out to me the most is family,” he continued, noting he and his wife plan to move to Brandon this summer. “I have a couple of young grandchildren that I’d really like to spend more time with. And my wife for that matter, though we’ve giggled about it that we don’t need to be attached to each other all the time … my wife has sacrificed a lot over the years, and hockey isn’t the only sport I’ve been involved in coaching and playing.
“I’ve been heavily involved in baseball and fastball so I’ve been away a lot over the course of my lifetime and so it’s just about family, and my time has probably come.”
Small town roots
Schneider’s journey to the coaching ranks started with his time playing junior A with the Weyburn Red Wings and major junior with the Brandon Wheat Kings from 1977-82, but he admits his first love as a teenager was actually for football.
“I wasn’t about to give up my high school football (in Regina) for hockey, and my dad was really upset with me and he wanted me to pursue hockey, but I played anyway then suffered a pretty serious ankle injury that took me away from Red Wings training camp, and I wasn’t able to start the season with the Red Wings but I healed up and eventually was able to make my way from midget hockey to the SJHL,” said Schneider, who grew up in Colfax – about a 25-minute drive north of Weyburn.
Schneider joined the Pats as a scout in 2015 after four seasons as head coach of Brandon’s under-18 AAA team, and signed on as assistant coach starting with the 2021-22 season.
While the Pats missed playoffs in three of his five seasons and lost their first round playoff matchup in the other two, the experience also gave Schneider a front-row seat to the early days of two next-level junior prospects in Connor Bedard and Maddox Schultz.
Bedard posted 271 points in 134 games over three seasons ending in 2023, while Schultz was granted exceptional status to play as a 15-year-old this year and had 29 points in 34 games this year.
“I feel extremely fortunate to have been part of something like that where Connor was concerned when I first came onboard. I remember when John hired me as a coach he said ‘You’re not gonna believe this kid when you see him’ and he was more than right,” said Schneider.
“But for me more than anything it was incredible to watch the amount of commitment on his part in every facet of his life to get to where he got. He certainly did things in repetition over and over and over again, whether it came to eating, sleeping, shooting pucks, all those things that the media has gone over and over and over. But to see it and witness it firsthand was incredible and it rubbed off. That was the other thing that struck me was how some of the players around him started to develop the same habits.”
From teacher to student
Similarly effusive about his short time working with Schultz, Schneider saved some of his highest praise for Pats head coach Brad Herauf.
“I’ve learned so much from Brad even though I’m 20 years older than him and my kid’s almost the same age as him, but I’ve learned so much,” said Schneider. “He coaches with a lot of emotion on his sleeve for sure but there’s probably no one who cares more about his players than Brad. If there’s anyone who cares more about his players you’d be hard-pressed to find him.
“I just learned so much from Brad in terms of strategy and systems that I thought I had a pretty good handle on, but over the course of time the game’s changed a lot and he taught me so much in our time working together.”
Still, Pats general manager Dale Derkatch told the SportsCage that Schneider’s legacy with the team will go far beyond the X’s and O’s.
“Everyone raved about Ken in terms of how he interacts with the players,” said Derkatch. “He’s probably a bit of a dad figure to some of them and he knows himself, his son having played for the Pats, what the players are going through and what they need. He’s just a real true gentleman and a great guy and he’ll be missed.”
