While playing with E.C. Sírio of the Brazilian Basketball Championship, Schmidt won both the South American Club Championship and the FIBA Intercontinental Cup in 1979.

With the Brazil men’s national basketball team, Schmidt played in five Summer Olympics (the second player to do so after Teófilo Cruz) and was the top scorer in three of them. However, he never went past the quarterfinals. In the 1980 Summer Olympics, he played seven games and scored 169 points, for a 24.1 average.

He again scored 169 points in seven games in the 1984 Summer Olympics. His best Olympic performance was the 1988 Summer Olympics. He scored 338 points, for an average of 42.3 points per game.

Schmidt won the Italian Cup with JuveCaserta in 1988. He was the Top Scorer of the Italian Basketball League 7 times (1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1989, 1990, 1992). He also led the Spanish Basketball League in scoring in 1994, while he was a member of Valladolid.

In 1992, he scored 198 points in eight games, and in 1996, he scored 219 points in 8 games. In 38 career Olympic basketball games, Schmidt scored a record of 1,093 points, for an average of 28.8 points per game.

He returned to his native Brazil in 1995, to play once again in the Brazilian Basketball Championship with S.C. Corinthians Paulista, and was the league’s top scorer 8 times (1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003). He retired on May 26, 2003.

In 2004, Schmidt started his career in management. He was the CEO of “Telemar Rio de Janeiro”, a Brazilian professional basketball team which won the “Campeonato Carioca” (Rio de Janeiro State Championship) in 2004, and the Brazilian Championship in 2005.

In 2006, Schmidt, along with other Brazilian basketball greats such as Paula and Hortência, (another Hall of Fame member), led the NLB: Nossa Liga de Basquete (“our basketball league”), an attempted rival to the Brazilian Basketball Championship. However, the league folded a year later.

On May 13, 2013, Schmidt had brain surgery to excise a malignant tumor. At first, nobody knew about it except for his family. The press found out about the disease fifteen days after the surgery at a dinner celebrating the 50th anniversary of the two-time World Champion Brazil National Team. Schmidt did not appear as he was recuperating from daily chemotherapy sessions. The disease is now in remission.

In 2016, he was one of the guests at the opening ceremony of the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics, alongside other Brazilian celebrities such as model Gisele Bündchen, actor Gustavo Goulart, and singer Caetano Veloso, among others.