For the last 51 years, the athletics programs at Thomas More and Northern Kentucky University have existed, almost side-by-side. Thanks to I-275, they’re less than nine minutes apart, with just 7.96 miles between the campuses.
TMU is in Crestview Hills; NKU is in Highland Heights.
TMU is in Kenton County; NKU is in Campbell County.
But in many ways, the athletic programs might as well be on different planets. Small private school Thomas More has football. Large public university Northern Kentucky does not. Small school TMU wins national championships. Big school NKU . . . well, it’s been a while.
Thomas More was formerly Villa Madonna College when it was in downtown Covington. Classrooms went wherever they could find space, from salons to bookie joints. The school has always had a uniquely neighborhood – and underdog – feel in Northern Kentucky. And a 24-year head start on NKU.
The people who run the TMU athletics program mostly went to school there, played there – some are even second-generation there. They’re from Greater Cincinnati, just like pretty much all of TMU’s athletes.
NKU, after starting with an almost all local base in 1971, has gone another direction.
The people running the program are mostly from somewhere else — Green Bay, Wisconsin, or Northern Iowa by way of Fresno State. The men’s basketball team, NKU’s highest profile program, had just one Northern Kentuckian on scholarship this past season. Although star freshman Sam Vinson from state champ Highlands came in as Kentucky’s Mr. Basketball.
Both programs have history to point to.
Thomas More has produced two NBA players – Larry Staverman and Danny Tieman — and one big-time major league baseball player in David Justice. Justice, who attended TMU on a basketball scholarship, went on to become a National League rookie of the year, three-time all-star, and two-time World Series champion as well as AL Championship Series MVP in a 14-year MLB career for the Atlanta Braves, Cleveland Indians, New York Yankees, and Oakland A’s.
Then there’s Charlie Wolf, who left Villa Madonna to become head coach of the Cincinnati Royals and the Detroit Pistons in the NBA. Staverman, after his five-year NBA career for the Royals, Chicago, Baltimore, and Detroit, was the first coach of the ABA’s Indiana Pacers and later the Kansas City Kings before becoming the CEO of Cleveland Memorial Stadium for the Browns and Indians.
And finally, don’t forget those three national championships and one national runner-up finish – all in women’s basketball in both the NCAA Division III and NAIA under 12-year Coach Jeff Hans, a former NKU assistant. And to top things off, the TMU men’s basketball team finished in the final four as an NAIA national semifinalist this past March. The Saints women’s roster had 14 players from Greater Cincinnati, the men 15.
Northern has produced four MLB players, but none the caliber of Justice. And no NBA players or coaches. But back in the day, when Northern got its start, the Norse were founded as part of an agreement between then Dean of Students Jim Claypool and President Frank Steely that pre-dated Title IX’s final passing. Steely agreed to start athletics on the new campus with four sports – men’s basketball and baseball and women’s volleyball and basketball – after he was assured there would be equal scholarships for the men and women, a commitment unprecedented at the time in both Kentucky and the nation.
In its early years, a Division II NKU could recruit with and hold its own – winning two of the first five games against Xavier – back in the mid- to late-1970s. And more recently, after NKU ascended to Division I, the Norse made it to March Madness twice in their first three years of eligibility – and the NIT the third – facing Kentucky and Louisville in two of those postseasons.
For Thomas More, starting football in 1990 was something of a strategy of survival. With its 100-plus players, football was an instantaneous enrollment infusion, and it remains so to this day. With 1,200 undergrads, TMU AD Terry Connor figures some 600 are involved in the 26 NCAA sports teams, the band, dance and cheer. Add in the clubs and non-NCAA sports, and that number is closer to 800.
Athlete numbers at 16,000-enrollment NKU don’t get to where TMU is with 225 student-athletes in 17 sports with a budget of $15,076,506 that TMU could only dream about as reported in USA TODAY’s most recent study of college athletics finances. But those expenditures include the University’s contribution with 84.48 percent coming from institutional funding, the balance from ticket sales, gifts, and rights fees. Of the 230 Division I programs surveyed, only 27 provided a higher percentage of athletic funding from institutional funds. As for that more than $15 million budget, 28 Division I schools with football spend less money on athletics. The lack of money that kept NKU from going Division I for years no longer seems a problem.
And while Northern Kentucky University’s overall marketing efforts no longer seem as visible as in past years, TMU stepped up to become the title sponsor of Thomas More Stadium in Florence, home of the Y’alls independent minor league baseball team and the Ninth Region high school baseball tournament. The highly visible location on I-75 has 160,000 cars pass by every day.
Thomas More: 42 years without a gym
TMU AD Terry Connor recalls walking out of the school’s Connor Center after the school announced in July that it had been accepted back into the NCAA as a Division II program. The center was named for his father, the legendary Jim Connor, who preceded him as a coach and AD there.
“I got pretty emotional,” Connor said.
A former coach and athlete at TMU, Terry played in the first baseball game on campus in 1986.
“I don’t know there could be a much better feeling,” said Terry, who after coaching basketball at TMU has been AD for the last 19 years. “I think about what dad did here – they didn’t even have a gym. You’re talking about standing on the shoulders of all those people who came before us. It’s pretty special knowing what we’re able to do thanks to them. When you think about it, how did they ever do that?”
Indeed, how did Thomas More survive 42 years without a gym? How did the Saints survive practicing at St. Ben’s Grade School in Covington where they didn’t always have heat?
But Thomas More has always played above its weight.
“Without a doubt,” Connor said, noting that to do what the Saints program has done in recent years, “You better be a good team.”
Connor emphasized the “team” part, which in this case reflects well on the work of women’s coach Hans, one of the nation’s best, and men’s coach Justin Ray. Both are clearly punching above their weight.
For the first time, TMU has full-time assistant basketball coaches. And there are two full-time co-sports information directors.
“We’re going to have 30 sports (counting non-NCAA sports like rugby, archery, and bowling),” Connor said. “You have to cover all that.”
But football starts it off, and the Griffin Family Stadium – with its all-purpose turf and track and field facilities the last 14 years and the home to eight sports teams – is an asset “you just can’t measure,” Connor said.
It was a big leap in 1990 when TMU decided to add football to the sports marquee. Beechwood High School head coach Noel Rash was one of many whose lives would never be the same following that decision.
A 1985 graduate of Lloyd Memorial, Rash had listed coaching football and teaching as his senior goal leaving high school.
“But I was working for Delta at the airport when I heard Thomas More was starting football and I called my mom and said I’m coming home,” Rash said.
What a start for TMU – and Rash’s coaching career, which has produced seven state titles in eight championship game appearances for Beechwood. In the TMU program’s second year of football, with Rash as a hard-hitting strong safety and corner, the Saints were an unbeaten 10-0. In Year 3, they were in the NCAA Division III playoffs.
It was magical. And something of an illusion.
“Building a football program takes time,” Connor said. “Football is just different.”
The change in culture was something, Rash said – especially for the 100-plus males who had been attending a school whose student body in the early years had been mostly nuns.
“That’s why we didn’t have any big boosters to start,” Rash said with a laugh. “Those nuns didn’t take a salary.”
But somehow football – and the school – survived each other. As did Rash’s dream to teach and coach.
“Man, did we land some dudes,” Rash says of those early years, referencing the coaching staff of Vic Clark as well as the players. They also learned to turn TMU’s commuter-school character into a positive. “It’s like the advantage we have here at Beechwood, we all know each other and we’ll fight for each other.”
The biggest difference, Connor said, is that people know who they are now.
“I’ve been a big backer of Thomas More,” said Great Midwest Athletic Conference Commissioner Tom Daeger at the July announcement of the school’s NCAA acceptance as the league’s newest member. “A strong athletic program like theirs is good for our league and good for Greater Cincinnati.”
“It’s a perfect fit for them,” says Rick Meyers, who worked the first game played at Regents Hall as an NKU student and is still going strong now 50 years later after retiring as NKU’s chief marketing officer after a long career as sports information director. He also does the official scorer’s duties for Thomas More and Xavier. “An absolutely perfect fit for them.”
Here’s another perfect fit: TMU in Northern Kentucky. “You know what they say about six degrees of separation,” Terry Connor says with a grin, “well, in Northern Kentucky, it’s 0.02 percent degrees of separation.” Everybody knows everybody and seems like they always have.
Northern Kentucky … we’re near Cincinnati
Jim Claypool was the first employee hired at NKU. He was still a young assistant history professor at Murray State when Frank Steely was hired as the then Northern Kentucky State College’s first president. Claypool, a former Beechwood High five-sport athlete, was in his element and right at home as NKSC’s first dean of students pushing hard for athletics.
And even though that first NKSC basketball team, like Thomas More, didn’t have a gym to play in and borrowed high school gyms around Northern Kentucky for its “home” games, that was part of its charm. This was a program of, for and with Northern Kentuckians with early success in both recruiting and on the court against the likes of Xavier, a team the NCAA Division II Norse beat two of the first five times they played – all at Xavier.
Former Covington Catholic coach Mote Hils got basketball off to a competitive start, despite the gym issues that 1,500-seat Regents Hall did not exactly resolve. Hils took Northern to the NCAA Division II tournament with a 20-win team ranked as high as No. 4 in the nation in 1978. Meanwhile, former Covington Holmes player Bill Aker was getting baseball off to a similarly strong start. His former club baseball team won a school record 49 games in its sixth season in 1977 and made it to the NAIA World Series in Lewiston, Idaho, in 1985.
Not to be outdone, NKSC’s women’s teams, under pioneering Marilyn Scroggin, were using those scholarships to beat Division I teams from Xavier, Cincinnati, Louisville, and Kentucky. Then it fell to one of her top players from that first NKSC team – Nancy Winstel from nearby St. Thomas High School in Ft. Thomas – to make the Lady Norse a national power, winning 636 games and two national championships in 29 seasons before retiring in 2012.
The men’s basketball team was also moving on with a former St. Thomas coach, Ken Shields, out of Covington Catholic as a player and Highlands High School as a coach, to a Division II national basketball powerhouse out of the Great Lakes Valley Conference with back-to-back NCAA championship game appearances in 1996 and 1997.
Another Northern Kentuckian, John Brannen from Newport Central Catholic, would arrive to oversee the program’s long-awaited transition to Division I with NKU becoming just the seventh team to make the NCAA March Madness tournament in its first year of eligibility after the 2016-17 season.
That was a decade after the opening of the newly renamed Truist Arena, a 9,200-seat on-campus facility that opened in 2007. Andy Enfield, now the coach at the University of Southern California but a former assistant at Florida State in the Atlantic Coast Conference and head coach at Florida Gulf Coast, an Atlantic Sun Conference partner with NKU for three years, raves about NKU’s arena. “It would easily be in the top half of the ACC,” he says.
But now, for the first time in its history, not a single top administrator or coach of either of the marquee NKU basketball programs is a Northern Kentucky native. That’s a problem, said Claypool, a professor emeritus of history at NKU, author of six books, co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Northern Kentucky, and speaker for the Kentucky Humanities Council.
One incident in the past year impacts that sense of separation of the NKU program from the Northern Kentucky community. The Northern Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame had been planning a program to honor NKU’s first 50 years of athletics. In addition to honoring former NKU coaches and players, there was a one-hour documentary produced by Northern Kentucky’s Community Cable Channel of the event. Not a single person from the NKU Athletic Department did, despite months of invitations and negotiations.
As several former NKU employees have noted, the athletic department doesn’t respond to their offers of help, doesn’t consult them on various projects like Hall of Fame nominations. And they’re not sure why but there’s just an increasing separation, it seems, from a university that more often describes itself as “near downtown Cincinnati.”
“I would say it’s a mistake for the athletic leaders at NKU to overlook the wisdom, contributions, and achievements of the past, and to fail to seek opinions and ideas from those who have laid the program’s foundations,” Claypool said. “And to look at the program as a continuum that always has to be treated as a significant way to engender school spirit and pride. It is, after all, the most public way of putting Northern’s name out there, academics notwithstanding.”
NKU Vice President and Director of Athletics, Christina Roybal, said she is unaware of the sense that the athletic department seems disconnected from the area.
Roybal assumed the department’s leadership mantle July 1, succeeding the retiring Ken Bothof, who came from Wisconsin-Green Bay.
“I haven’t heard it to that degree,” Roybal said. “Personally, I’d like to be visible. And I’ve had conversations with our staff about that. We have discussed that but not because of any perception of it.”
Roybal, a Fresno, California, native and an alumna of Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California, started her career in college athletics at Fresno State for 10 years before moving on to the No. 2 spot at Northern Iowa.
Just don’t say she’s a Californian trying to adjust to Northern Kentucky, but a Californian “via Iowa the last six years,” she said with a laugh. She knows winter now, and the Midwest, and “loves it.” Even the rain doesn’t bother her, she said.
As for the challenges at NKU, not having a football program as the big fall sport with the band, stadium, tailgating, is no big deal, she said, even if Fresno State and Northern Iowa are football schools. Her alma mater “Saint Mary’s has a great identity and it’s not a football school,” she said.
And with just one Horizon League football school in Youngstown State, NKU’s conference “prides itself on basketball,” Roybal says.
But when you check out the numbers, the school with the biggest arena, Wright State, leads the league with an average of just 3,309 a game in the 10,400-seat Nutter Center, while NKU is third in men’s basketball attendance at 2,385 a game in the 9,200-seat Truist Arena (the women are fifth with 690 a game).
NKU hasn’t had the easiest of times in the Horizon League, winning just five of the league’s 55 championships in its seven years there with an average across-the-board sport-by-sport finish of 7.4 in the 10-team league. And yet, only two Horizon programs and football school Youngstown State have larger athletic budgets than NKU.
But if almost all the end memories of this past basketball season are positive for the folks at Thomas More, that’s not the case for NKU. On their way to their 15th win in their last 17 games, Darrin Horn’s Norse were just 11:41 away from a trip to the NCAA Tournament as Horizon League champs with a nationally televised 57-41 tourney championship lead over Wright State. And then it happened. Outscored 30-14 down the stretch, the Norse headed home from Indianapolis 72-71 losers with a very bitter pill in their mouths.
“I’d love to be at the top of our conference,” Roybal says, describing herself as “competitive . . . but we’re pretty young (10 years) as a Division I program.”
Her goals are straightforward, Roybal said: Get to know people, get more competitive, establish a strong NKU brand in the community and “grow our revenue.”
But first, Roybal, whose days are filled with meetings that caused this interview to take more than two weeks to finalize and had her asking for a list of questions prior to the interview (something we never do and did not do here), was finalizing a couple of hires. One was for a director of strategic communications, the other a creative director for marketing.
And yet the regional university has not been looking for persons with Northern Kentucky knowledge, history, or experience. “Not necessarily,” Roybal said. “It’s the person that has that skill set.”
As for not having anyone with local institutional memory among the top staff, “It does not worry me,” she said.
But it does worry a Northern Kentucky expert like Claypool . . . and a number of former NKU players and staffers who would like to see a bit more Northern Kentucky in the Northern Kentucky athletic program.
Here’s a thought. Now that TMU is moving up to the NCAA’s Division II, how about a Northern Kentucky Classic TMU-NKU men’s-women’s basketball doubleheader every December in Truist Arena.
It would put fans in all those normally unoccupied seats. The buzz and the buildup would be great for Northern Kentucky – and for both programs.
Nike had it right: Just do it.
