John Gasaway - Miracles on the Hardwood: The Hope-and-a-Prayer Story of a Winning Tradition in Catholic College Basketball

O n the day after her 100th birthday in 2019, Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt received a visitor in her office and talked about college basketball. Sister Jean had become a household name as chaplain for a Loyola Chicago team that made a surprise run to the 2018 Final Four. When she was asked by a reporter at that years NCAA tournament what it was like to wake up and find oneself a national celebrity, she edited the question before answering it: International celebrity.

In her office that day, Sister Jean shifted effortlessly between discussing the Xs and Os of the 2018 Ramblers and dissecting Loyolas national champions from 1963. She had observed both teams at close range and, as a basketball addict, her knowledge extended well beyond the Ramblers. Sister Jean spoke perceptively of Bill Russell at San Francisco, as well as of the St. Johns teams of the 1950s. She could cite chapter and verse from all of the above, based not on research conducted decades after the fact but on the real-time observations of an enthralled fan.

Speaking with Sister Jean about any 20th-century event leads to a quick mental calculation of her age at the time in question. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, she was already teaching at a parochial school in Southern California. She was born less than 30 years after James Naismith invented the game of basketball, and her spectating predated the creation of both the National Invitation and the National Collegiate Athletic Association tournaments. The joy that Sister Jean found in watching basketball and the contentment in her voice when noting that Loyola is the only team from Illinois ever to win the NCAA tournament (Were very proud of that) were both unmistakable. Shes also been impressed by what shes seen from Catholic programs more recently and from Villanova in particular.

Consider one pocket history of 21st-century Catholic college basketball: Villanova won two NCAA titles, Gonzaga reached the national championship game, Loyola Chicago made its run to the Final Four, and Marquette and Georgetown appeared in national semifinals in their own rights. During this same span, Xavier earned a No. 1 seed and reached no fewer than three Elite Eights, while Saint Josephs also received a top seed and entered the tournament with a 271 record. Wooden Awards have been won this century by players from St. Joes (Jameer Nelson), Creighton (Doug McDermott), Villanova (Jalen Brunson), and Dayton (Obi Toppin). Nor will we ever know what might have transpired in a 2020 NCAA tournament that was never played, one in which Gonzaga and, potentially, Dayton might have earned top seeds.

Perhaps the first element to note in such a thumbnail is that so many of the programs namedall of them, actually, except Villanova and Daytonrepresent Jesuit institutions. This prominence is a feature not only of Catholic basketball but perhaps additionally of Catholic higher education as its commonly perceived. While they are a populous and visible presence, Jesuit institutions, or indeed those of any one order, do not constitute a majority of Catholic colleges and universities in the United States. Nevertheless, the frequent conflation of Catholic with Jesuit persists among the general public, and college basketball is likely one significant contributing factor.