Sr. Jean Dolores-Schmidt was a local celebrity long before she became one of the most popular figures in this year’s NCAA Tournament.
Steve Watson has seen the warm impression she leaves on people for the last three-plus years.
Sr. Jean, the 98-year-old nun and team chaplain of the Loyola-Chicago men’s basketball team, has captured the heart of the nation with her cheerful post-game interviews and surprisingly strong hoops acumen during the Ramblers’ Cinderella-like run to the Sweet 16.
In a humorous twist, she picked Loyola to make the Sweet 16 in her bracket, but to lose in the following round. Her bracket has been a newsworthy happening for years, said Watson, the Loyola athletics director since leaving the same post at St. Bonaventure in the winter of 2014.
“She’s a celebrity on campus,” Watson said with a laugh. “That’s been the case for years — everybody knows Sr. Jean.
“As the team has had more and more success, she’s become pretty well-known in Chicago; she’s been on the local TV stations with her bracket predictions. This year, with the success we had down in Saint Louis in the league tournament, people started to pick up on her. It was automatic in Dallas … as soon as they figured out we had a 98-year-old nun on our bench.”
Watson was in Dallas for the Ramblers’ dramatic, buzzer-beating upsets of No. 6 Miami and No. 3 Tennessee over the weekend. It was a special few days for the 1986 Archbishop Walsh graduate, and not just due to the history the basketball team made.
Watson played his final two collegiate seasons for Jim Larranaga at Bowling Green from 1988-90. Larranaga happened to be on the opposite sideline, as the Miami coach, in Loyola’s 64-62 victory in the Round of 64 Thursday. The matchup allowed Watson, who’d stayed in touch with Larranaga over the years, to connect with his former coach and his wife at American Airlines Center.
And then there was the emotional reunion with his former team, the school that remains a big part of his family and the coach he hired in the spring of 2007 — Mark Schmidt.
Already in Dallas with the Ramblers, Watson watched from a local bar as the Bonnies pulled out a 65-58 First Four triumph two nights earlier over UCLA, the program’s first NCAA Tournament win in 48 years. “We were all going nuts” when the final buzzer sounded and he realized that his hometown team would be joining him in American Airlines Center.
Over the next two days, his Bona and Loyola ties were essentially woven together.
Watson’s son Jackson and Schmidt’s youngest son, Mike, who recently led Olean High to a sectional title, spent part of Wednesday working out with former Bonnie Tyler Relph, now an acclaimed skills guru based in Texas. Loyola and Bona fans happened to share the same pre- and post-game gathering spot.
After watching Loyola pull off the biggest upset of the tournament to that point — it was eventually overtaken by UMBC’s shocking triumph over Virginia, the first win by a No. 16 seed over a No. 1 — Watson went to that spot, where he was able to reconnect with a number of Bona and Olean people while celebrating with the Loyola crowd.
Since that game was one of the early afternoon contests, he was able to watch the Bonnies’ late-night showdown with Florida as a fan. He was more than appreciative of how this year’s bracket happened to unfold.
“It was so fun to see those guys,” he said. “For us to get the two buzzer-beating wins, it was surreal. Our whole city was going nuts. The exposure we’ve gotten in the last few days has been tremendous.”
Watson set the Bonnies’ current run of success in motion by hiring Schmidt away from Robert Morris in April of 2007. He was the athletic director at Bona when it won the Atlantic 10 Tournament and played in the Big Dance in 2012, and extended Schmidt shortly after that run.
The only thing that was missing from an otherwise perfect weekend was a Bona victory over the Gators. The No. 11 Bonnies lost to sixth-seeded Florida, 77-62. But a disappointing ending hardly dampened a record-setting campaign, Watson said.
“It was trending toward the perfect weekend,” he said. “But I think if we’d had another double-header on Saturday, my head would have exploded. It was just an awesome season for Mark and the program and his team. They’re just a fun team to watch. I think they just ran out of gas.”
As for Sr. Jean, Watson was hardly surprised when he heard her inform a national audience about what makes the Ramblers a good team, how big a fan she is and her influence on making Loyola a success.
Told she’s now a “national celebrity,” Sr. Jean corrected a reporter, saying amusingly, “you mean international celebrity.”
“She leads the team in prayers AND she provides a scouting report (on the next opponent),” Watson said. “How can’t you love that? She’s sharp as a tack, she loves Loyola, she has a great relationship with (coach Porter Moser) and the players, and for her, it’s been a blast.
“It’s really cool to have somebody like that for our team.”
