The Ramblers' secret weapon [Updated]

Those of you of (ahem) a certain age may recall that Loyola University of Chicago won the NCAA men's basketball national championship in 1963.  Since reaching the peak of the mountain 55 years ago, it has been mostly valleys for the Ramblers.


 Loyola made the tournament a few more times during the decade of the 1960s (including the "Round of 23" in 1968 - no idea how that worked), then slid below the surface for a couple of decades.  There was a very brief sighting above the waterline in 1985, when Alfredrick Hughes, whom one Chicago sportswriter dubbed "the man with three first names", led the Ramblers to an unlikely Sweet 16 birth.

By that time, when Patrick Ewing's Georgetown Hoyas bounced the Ramblers from the tourney, I was a recent graduate of Loyola and still living in Rogers Park, the far-north-side Chicago neighborhood where Loyola's Lake Shore Campus is situated.  I had hoped that the '85 tournament appearance was the harbinger of a program on the rise, but alas - it was followed by 32 straight seasons of March sadness for Ramblers fans, who are a rather small if not particularly select club.

But the tournament drought has ended.  Loyola was granted an automatic bid this year by winning the Missouri Valley Conference postseason tournament.   And the Ramblers already have rewarded their fans with yesterday's heart-stopping last-second, three-point-shot victory over ACC powerhouse Miami (aka "The U").

The game was the quintessence of March Madness, in which obscure schools (at least basketball-wise, if not always academically) with double-digit-number seeds are apt to rise up in the early rounds to zap land-grant universities and programs that are short-term way stations to the NBA.  Loyola is the underdog out of central casting.  It has no player in its rotation taller than 6' 9" and the average height of its starting five is less than 6' 5" - about the same as some high school teams.  None of the players on its squad are considered locks, or perhaps even prospects, to play in the NBA.  Its coach, Porter Moses, is in his seventh season with the Ramblers; some elite programs would be on their third coach during a seven-year span with only one NCAA appearance.  Judging by their media appearances, the players are nice kids, respectful of their elders and opponents and humble about their accomplishments so far this season.  Watching and listening to them, they seem like college students.

And Loyola has a secret ingredient.  She is Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, the team's chaplain.  Sister Jean is a 98 year old Sister of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.   She was a student athlete and a girls basketball coach herself in her younger days.  In the early 1960's, she was assigned to Mundelein College, at the time a women's college whose campus was adjacent to Loyola's Lake Shore Campus.  Mundelein merged with Loyola in the early 1990s, about the time that Sister Jean retired.  Then Loyola asked her if she'd consider being the basketball team's chaplain.  Sister Jean wasn't exactly sure how to be a chaplain, but she explained her approach in a recent Chicago Tribune profile:

I wanted to be their friend first of all and be sure to encourage them. They know they can talk to me any time they want. We can pray together. I don’t try to take (coach Porter Moser’s) job, but we talk about people we need to watch on the other side.

Don't assume that "people we need to watch on the other side" is a spiritual reference to sinners or demons; it turns out that Sister Jean, with her athletics background and still-sharp powers of observation, is a fount of basketball acumen in her own right, and finds it natural to intermix it with her prayers and petitions.  Senior Donte Ingram, who hit yesterday's game-winning shot, observed:

She’s like another coach. The first game (as a freshman), it caught me off guard. I thought she was just going to pray. She prayed, but then she starts saying, ‘You’ve got to box out and watch out for 23.’
“She knows her stuff. She’s on it. She’s not just here to clap, but she also lifts you up. There’s times I didn’t play up to my abilities, and Sister Jean will be like, ‘You’ll get them next time, Donte.’ ”

After yesterday's game, each member of the Rambler squad stopped by Sister Jean's wheelchair and gave her as gentle a hug as a sweaty student-athlete can bestow on a nonagenarian.  Then Tru TV, which was carrying Loyola's game as part of the network-of-networks needed to televise all of the tournament games, used some of its precious post-game interview time to interview Sister Jean.  And now it seems that Sister Jean is going viral.

With apologies to any Tennessee Volunteers fans who may chance to read this: Go Ramblers!  And God bless Sister Jean.

UPDATE 3/17/2018: Loyola has advanced to the Sweet 16, upsetting Tennessee on a basket by Clayton Custer with about 4 seconds remaining on the clock.  It's been a heck of a ride already, but these young men would better serve their older fans by putting some of these games away a bit earlier in the contest: this time-running-out, game-saving-shot business is risking the health of those of us with weaker hearts.  Sister Jean seemed to be on-screen nearly as much as the players - the producers kept breaking over to her for reaction shots, the way they do to coaches' wives and players' parents for other teams.  I'm not certain she's actually digging the role of national celebrity, but she seems to be taking it in good humor, presumably for the sake of the program and to offer witness to her faith.