The mystery health scare that forced a rising basketball coach to adjust his perspective

You are OK.

Seven years ago, Josh Schertz’s doctor pulled out his prescription pad and gave Schertz a sheet with just that note. He was to tape it to the back of his phone and read those three words whenever he thought he wasn’t.

His wife, Natalia, has put the note away for safe keeping, but the message has stayed with Saint Louis’ 49-year-old coach ever since.

Schertz’s tendency to fixate on details helped him become a tennis phenom as a child and a great basketball coach as an adult. When he narrows his focus on something, he goes all-in. He built one of the worst programs in Division II basketball into one of the best and then moved up to Division I, where he led Indiana State to its third Missouri Valley championship in school history last spring.

Early in his career, Schertz would have spent the Christmas break going down a rabbit hole trying to unlock the solution to a mediocre 6-6 start with his new program. But seven years ago, a medical mystery almost pushed him off the sideline for good and forever changed his perspective.

Because he felt far from OK.

In late June 2017, months after making his second straight D-II Final Four at Lincoln Memorial University, Schertz was supposed to be at dinner with a recruit. Instead, he was in bed feeling miserable and frigid.

For weeks, Schertz would turn bright red from his chest up, as if he had a bad sunburn, multiple times a day. He was nauseous and dizzy. He couldn’t keep food down and struggled to swallow his own saliva. But a trip to the doctor and then to the ER ended with tests that didn’t show anything out of the ordinary.

With the facial flushing came exhaustion. Schertz would get to his bed as quickly as he could and go to sleep. “He was super cold,” Natalia said. “I couldn’t put any more blankets on him.” At night, he would wake up from twitching in his muscles, starting at his triceps, down to his fingers. It was so pronounced Natalia could see the pulsating.

Google told him that was a symptom of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). And he was living on Google, spending sleepless nights typing symptoms into his phone.

The week after the symptoms forced him to miss a recruiting weekend in late June, he got an electromyography (EMG) procedure to check for ALS. Negative. He got an upper endoscopy and, a week later, a lower endoscopy to examine his digestive system. Nothing abnormal.

About a month in, his doctor theorized that he had fibromyalgia, a condition that causes muscle pain, fatigue, sleep and memory issues. Later, an Ear, Nose and Throat doctor told Schertz that he had the driest ear and throat he’d ever seen. The doctor told him he was 100 percent sure he had Sjogren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease, but a blood test said otherwise.

His primary care physician suggested he see a therapist and take medication for what he believed was health anxiety. Maybe the stress of his career had caused this?

Schertz pushed back. He had arguably the best job in Division II, having lost just 15 games over the previous four seasons. “Life was in a very good place,” Schertz says. “I’ve always been a person that’s been able to kind of compartmentalize my job and my life. I was anxious, because nobody could tell me what was happening. I knew I wasn’t right.”

Schertz agreed to see a therapist, but he wouldn’t take the meds. He also switched doctors. At the suggestion of LMU chair Pete DeBusk, Schertz started seeing David Rankin, an internal medicine doctor at the University of Tennessee Medical Center. They would also meet for breakfast, and Rankin came to some LMU games. Rankin’s presence helped ease Schertz’s racing mind.

“Everyone has fears,” Rankin says. “Mine is I don’t like heights. Most people don’t like to talk about their fears, but fear of having some terrible physical ailment that you’re going to die of in the near future is debilitating.”

DeBusk also had connections at the Mayo Clinic and got Schertz an appointment with specialists in late July. When Schertz arrived, he suddenly felt better. His appetite returned. The episodes of facial flushing and high blood pressure continued, but overall, he was as close to normal as he’d been.

If you’re feeling better, the Mayo doctors told him, let’s go with that. Schertz was back at the clinic two weeks later. He’d tried to go to a grassroots tournament in Orlando, and all of his symptoms returned. He slept through most of the games. When he did go to the gym, his mind just wasn’t there.

At his follow-up visit, they tested him for several forms of cancer, neuroendocrine tumors and autonomic neuropathy. He saw a neurologist and met with infectious disease doctors. He underwent a sweat test, where he had a towel placed over his privates, had red powder sprinkled on the rest of his body and then entered what felt like a giant oven. And he got another EMG to test for ALS, negative once again.

Then Schertz thought about the first doctor he had seen that week, an endocrinologist. The doctor had asked if Schertz wanted his opinion. Of course.

“I think we’re going to run all these tests, and I don’t think we’re going to be able to tell you what’s exactly wrong with you,” he said. “And I think you’re going to thank God that we can’t, because if we can tell you what’s wrong with you, it’s going to be really bad. But at the end of this week, I don’t think we’re going to be able to tell you. And I think that’s going to be the best thing — that we don’t know.”

“I went home without the answers,” Schertz says, “which I guess was a good thing.”

As Schertz visited Rankin more, the doctor realized that Schertz was as educated on the diseases he thought he might have as Rankin was.

“I didn’t want to shut him down as far as saying, well, look, just don’t do that anymore, because he’s going to do it anyway,” Rankin says.

So he gave him the prescription. You are OK.

That calmed his mind for a while. Outside of his home, he kept almost everyone in the dark. Schertz confided in his athletic director, the school president and DeBusk, but he let no one else around the program know how sick he was, and he never missed a practice.

“When you’re coaching a team, the last thing you want to do is have the players thinking about or worrying about anything other than what they need to do to play well and to be successful,” he says. “Nobody plays well distracted. And the last thing you want to do as a coach is be a distraction to your own team.”

But there were signs something was off by the time the season started in November. Schertz had lost 44 pounds in five months. His diet had become homemade chicken broth and Boost nutritional drinks, the only things he could keep down. He still felt sick and exhausted all the time. He would conduct film sessions, coach practice and games, but nothing else. No player meetings. No office hours. On road trips, Natalia would drive and he’d lie down in the backseat and sleep. Sometimes she’d have to drive him to practice too.

He couldn’t remember names. Word recall was an issue. He’d want a pen, pause to think and then blurt out, “Does anyone have something to write with?”

During games, he would try to stand on the sideline like he’d always done, but he’d feel dizzy and have to sit. The game moved faster than it ever had before. He’d have to stop and rewind film over and over just to figure out what was happening.

“The cognitive piece was scary,” Schertz says. “When I went to talk to the team, I felt like I had to keep it short, because I didn’t want to have to fumble for words or get stuck and try to figure out what I wanted to say.”

Lincoln Memorial was so good, no one on the outside would ever suspect something was amiss. His weight loss was obvious, but he got compliments on that. His team started 11-0, and most games weren’t close. LMU was averaging 101.8 points per game going into a pre-Christmas showdown against Northwest Missouri State in Owensboro, Ky. They were the top-ranked teams in the country — Northwest No.1 and LMU No. 2.

“That game just exposed me,” he says.

Schertz kept calling plays to the opposite side of the floor from where he actually wanted them run. “I vividly remember looking at Coach, like what are we doing?” said Scuta Taylor, the starting point guard on that team.

LMU lost 70-56.

“I wasn’t thinking clearly or as fast, and I wasn’t doing the job,” Schertz says.

The Schertzes were supposed to leave for Miami after the game, an annual family trip, but Schertz told Natalia he just wanted to go home. And that night he made another decision. He would coach until the end of the season and then resign.

On his bad days, just the thought of showering felt like too much exertion. But because Schertz loved basketball and loved that team, he dragged himself to practice. He still loved practice.

And while he didn’t feel like he had a steady hand on the controls, the games were justification that he’d done something right. The Railsplitters were back to their dominant selves after Christmas, winning their next three games by a combined 96 points. The next big test was a road game against rival Queens, which had risen to No. 1 in the rankings. LMU won by one point and then won the rest of its regular season games — all by double digits — ending with a rematch against Queens, another No. 1 vs. No. 2 battle. The top-ranked Railsplitters won that game by 15, cruised to the conference tournament finals and beat Queens a third time, 77-75.

In Division II, the first three rounds of the NCAA Tournament are played between teams in the same region. LMU won its first two games by double digits and matched up with Queens for a fourth time.

The issues of the Northwest Missouri State game returned. The 69-57 loss haunts Schertz more than any other in his career.

“We never thought we would lose, even when we got down 10,” Taylor says. “But from the start, it just felt off.”

“I put a lot of it on myself, because I wasn’t able to be for them how I should have been,” Schertz says. “I remember trying to address the team in the locker room after the game and just breaking down. Sobbing. Dorian (Pinson) had to come out of his locker to console me after the game. He’s hugging me, trying to pick me up.”

Schertz had backed off his stance that he was finished coaching, but he wasn’t entirely convinced he could continue. He decided to give himself a couple of weeks to decide. He wanted an unbiased opinion on his fitness to do the job. He scheduled a third trip to the Mayo Clinic to ask their specialists if they thought he could still handle coaching.

By midseason, he’d started to feel slightly better. He was still tired. Still struggling to find his words. But he at least felt like a “shell of myself.” Whenever he questioned if he was ever going to get better, he’d look at the back of his phone.

As Schertz weighed his next move, he got word Arkansas Little Rock was interested in hiring him. He used the interviews as another barometer for his mental state. “I was like, OK, maybe I am doing better than what I think,” Schertz says. “I usually have pretty high standards for myself, and I realized maybe I was being a little bit too hard on myself because they didn’t say anything.”

Schertz did so well that Arkansas Little Rock’s athletic director Chasse Conque offered him the job, but the chancellor overruled Conque because he wanted to go with someone else.

That process was worth it, because it gave Schertz confidence in himself again. He still wanted one more assessment from the Mayo Clinic and scheduled a follow-up.

“I wanted to know how much this is in my mind, because there was so much anxiety about my health,” Schertz says. “Was I overblowing it? Was I being a hypochondriac?”

He never got answers on why he was sick. The closest he got was in September 2017, during the first few months of his symptoms, when his son Jaden tested positive for mononucleosis, and at the suggestion of Natalia, Schertz got tested too. The test results came back positive but said that he was in the convalescent phase, meaning that he had recovered. But he’d never been told he had mono before, and it’s an uncommon illness for someone in their 40s to contract. His doctors were skeptical mononucleosis could have been the root cause.

The specialists at the Mayo Clinic theorized he could have chronic fatigue syndrome and it was possible a virus had made his immune system overact, but they told him this was nothing to worry about long-term. He could return to his life. He could still coach.

Schertz slowly got better. The next year he wasn’t fully back to himself, but close. The next season LMU was on a 32-game winning streak entering the NCAA Tournament, which was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. LMU went to another Final Four the next year, and then Schertz left for Indiana State.

Every August he returns to the Mayo Clinic for a checkup — the executive physical — and he’s gotten a clean bill of health every year since 2018. Schertz now takes his vitamins (Flintstone, Mayo Clinic-approved) and a few other pills, checks his blood pressure every morning and tries to nap once a day. But mostly, life eventually returned to normal.

His outlook, however, changed forever.

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Sometimes Natalia will remind Schertz that the way basketball coaches operate is not normal. He says she’s good about making sure he steps away from the film to go on a walk, eat a meal without his phone or generally put time into the people in his life.

After losing on a buzzer beater at Grand Canyon in December, the third straight loss for Saint Louis, the Schertzes checked into a resort in Sedona. Cell service was spotty, and Natalia told Schertz to keep away from his phone and computer. (He’d sneak on the computer in the mornings before she woke up.) She made him go hiking for three straight days. They watched the sun set on the red rocks every night by a fire pit.

Schertz refilled his cup. Got his energy back. But also, pulling away allowed him to see the bigger picture more clearly.

“The way the world defines success for you is like cotton candy,” he says. “It evaporates quickly. Leaves you wanting more. You’ll never be fulfilled chasing those things. Your peace and contentment in life always comes from the relationships and the things in your life that are completely unconditional, that won’t be moved by who you are or how you did or how much money you make.”

The 2017-18 season forever changed how he sees coaching. It reminded him of his purpose: to serve the players. His 2021-22 debut at Indiana State, when his team went 11-20 for his first losing season as a head coach, added another layer of perspective for the challenges he’s encountered this season.

“I’d had such a charmed existence at LMU,” he says. “You win 30-plus games a year for a lot of years. It’s intoxicating. To go through a 20-loss season, to go through the transition from Division II to Division I, where not only are you losing, but everybody’s really questioning if you can coach. It was really hard for me and it was humbling. But the thing that helped me at Indiana State and helped me to navigate it (at Saint Louis) was if you don’t ascribe all the success that you had at LMU to yourself, which would be ridiculous in nature, then you can’t ascribe all the failures of the difficulties of Year 1 at Indiana State to yourself.”

When Schertz returned from Sedona in December, he leaned into working on those relationships. He took star forward Robbie Avila to lunch and told him he needed to focus more on his defense because his teammates see him as a leader. While the learning curve hadn’t been as quick as he’d hoped, he could feel his players starting to see the game how he saw it, buying into making the invisible plays that don’t show up on a box score but drive winning.

They were going to be OK.

And the Billikens’ outlook changed completely after Christmas. On that day, they ranked as the 10th-best team in the Atlantic 10 at KenPom.com. Now they’re in third place as they welcome in league leader George Mason on Tuesday. They ranked 277th in adjusted defensive efficiency on Christmas Day, per Bart Torvik, and they’ve been No. 42 since and fourth best in the A-10.

It’s satisfying to watch the improvement, but the wins and losses no longer define who he is.

“Going through the illness strengthened me and matured me, and it forever altered the lens with which I see life through,” Schertz says. “If I’m healthy and my loved ones are healthy, life is really good. Everything else is gravy on top of that. Because that can change in an instant.”

(Photo: Mitchell Layton / Getty Images)