As he continues head-coaching duties of a boys varsity high-school basketball team in Southern Maryland, Brad Leydig credits two people for influencing his career path.
Those impressions were made when Leydig was a student/athlete at Madison High School in Vienna, learning from the Warhawks’ late head football coach Lenny Schultz and current head boys hoops coach Kevin Roller.
Leydig played for both.
“They both made a massive impression on my life, were my two all-time favorite coaches, and are great human beings,” Leydig, a 2014 Madison graduate, told FFXnow. “I wanted to become a coach because of them.”
In his fourth year as head coach of the Chopticon High School boys varsity basketball team in southern Maryland and a business teacher at the school, Leydig follows many of the coaching examples, discipline, values, philosophies and principles he learned from Schultz and Roller.
“I remember Roller told us if you don’t play hard, you won’t play for us,” Leydig said. “That was OK with me. That’s how I earned playing time.”
Leydig, now 28, only played high-school basketball his senior year, beginning the 2013-14 campaign as the Warhawks’ 13th man on a 13th-player roster. Leydig remembers being told he likely wouldn’t get much playing time because he was a football player and not in basketball shape.
Roller, though, liked his toughness, attitude and all-out effort. The coach eventually named Leydig a team captain and gave him playing time, even a starting role in a playoff game.
“He was a bright spot,” said Roller, who has won more than 250 games as a high-school head coach. “He played hard and he would hold his teammates accountable.”
After graduating from Bridgewater College, where he played football and basketball, then while working toward a sports-management master’s degree at George Mason University, Leydig worked on Roller’s staff as an assistant coach for one season.
A decade after Leydig graduated from Madison, the friendship and competitiveness with Roller continues. The varsity boys basketball teams of Madison and Chopticon have played each other the past two seasons.
This year’s game was in Maryland, with Madison winning a close contest. The teams met in Vienna a year ago.
“It’s ‘Roller Ball’,” Leydig said. “I was raised in that system. He still uses some of the same names to call out the plays. I remember how they work, and made that work for us.”
Leydig is the first high-school player under Roller who has become a high-school head basketball coach.
Leydig was a tight end and defensive lineman in football at Madison under Schultz, who died in a traffic accident in 2017.
“Lenny was so loyal to his players, and I will always remember that,” Leydig said. “I was playing pickup basketball once at Nottoway Park. Lenny was driving by, saw me and stopped and talked for the longest time. That was such a great moment.”
At age 24, Leydig took the coaching position at Chopticon after working as an assistant coach for the St. Mary’s College Division III men’s basketball team. He took over a struggling Braves team that was 3-20 the previous season.
Chopticon improved to 6-17 in Leydig’s first year, 12-10 the next and 16-10 last winter, when the Braves finished second in its conference and region.
“I attribute all of this [success] to the culture we have built and our obsession with sports psychology,” Leydig said.
