Not every homeowner possesses a backyard large enough to drive golf balls from a tee box on the porch without worry of damage. Even fewer have a lake to host a blazing mock Viking funeral or be the splash point for projectiles fired from a wooden launcher.
John Schroeder can make all of these claims. The retired business owner (he sold Schroeder’s Landscape & Aquatic Nursery in 2017) describes his 14-acre West Side backyard as a passion project. “I did 4,300 backyards in my career, and I’m going to work on just one more,” he says.
Schroeder’s interest in a backyard course piqued in the late 1980s when he witnessed a man hitting golf balls off his deck. After Schroeder built his own raised deck in 1992, he installed synthetic turf and eventually built a par 3 green across the lake. Since then, he estimates that he and his friends have struck more than 150,000 balls in that direction.
His vision evolved into an 18-hole course with 12 tee boxes and four turf greens, under construction since 2022. Golfers from Mater Dei High School and the University of Southern Indiana — as well as the basketball team — have visited. Schroeder explains the concept as “exclusionary golf,” where a small group can have a private course for fundraising, team-building activity, or “just good-old fashioned fun.”
If that’s not fun enough, consider Schroeder’s trebuchet, a catapult-like medieval weapon. The idea was planted by fellow adult Boy Scout committee friends who “discussed how cool it would be,” he says. Assembled about five years ago with help from master carpenter Phil Shreve, the trebuchet’s massive arm can sling a watermelon or jug of water high into the air and plunge it into the lake a few hundred feet away. A fall gender reveal party featured exploding balls of colored powder over the lake. Schroeder has added an ax-throwing area.
The idea to go big and do it well was sparked by Mater Dei wrestling coaches Joe Gossman and Mike Goebel, plus Bobby Watson, the first-year University of Evansville men’s basketball coach who was killed in the Aces’ Dec. 13, 1977, airplane crash. “Take pride in what you do,” Schroeder remembers Watson telling high school students at an assembly.
Schroeder hosts a podcast and website called “Trespassing Aloud,” encouraging others “to dream big, be patient, and don’t be afraid to try different things,” he says, adding that his unique backyard is “my metaphor for a pretty exciting life while trying to stay balanced on the important things.”
