It’s taken three shots for the Thomas More men’s basketball team to finally make it to Kansas City for the NAIA National Basketball Championships.
Covid blocked the Saints on their first try after qualifying for the trip when the championships were canceled. Then a year ago even after getting to host the regionals, Thomas More fell short in the final game to Iowa’s Morningside. “We were heartbroken,” TMU Coach Justin Ray says.
Now, at last, they’re on the bus. Literally. The NAIA limits airfare for tournament teams to those at least 750 miles away. Crestview Hills is just over 530 miles from legendary Municipal Auditorium so “when the Saints go marching in” this week to downtown Kansas City, they’ll actually be doing so by bus.
With a No. 5 national ranking, a school-record 29 wins — and a real shot.
That’s the view of veteran Grand View Coach Denis Schaefer, after losing to TMU in the regional finals. He thought anyone in the top five could play with anyone else even if favored national No. 1 William Penn had the most talent — before Penn was knocked out Saturday by Kokomo Tech.
The Saints, he thought, were in the group that could win it all. And now with an even better shot with no Penn.
Thomas More opens Friday at 4 p.m. ET against SAGU – which is how they shorten the Southwestern Assemblies of God University from Waxahachie, Texas. And if there’s a more classic example of what an NAIA school is, it’s SAGU. It’s small (1,492 full-time undergrads). Religious. Private. And in a place called Waxahachie, Texas, although it’s only a half-hour outside the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex so it’s not in the middle of nowhere. It just kind of sounds like it is.
“They were a final four team last year,” Ray says of the Lions who beat Montana Tech to earn their trip to Kansas City, where all 16 teams stay in the same hotel and can walk across the street to Municipal Auditorium for the games. “I’d prefer to play Thursday,” Ray said. “You’d rather play than sit and wait.”
Beat SAGU and TMU could be looking at a matchup with the No. 1 seed in their quadrant, Oklahoma Wesleyan, a team that plays the “five-in, five-out” game where they sub an entire five like hockey teams do with new lines every couple of minutes no matter what. “Only one player averages more than 22 minutes a game,” Ray says.
That’s the kind of quirky stuff that has made the NAIA finals such a one-of-a-kind place for basketball junkies over its 84 years. As for Mid-South regular-season champ Thomas More, with a lineup that Ray says gives him “eight, nine guys who can do what we want them to do,” the Saints may be “the new guys in town,” but they have a chance to make a mark here. “I think so,” Ray says.
“We’ve had the last two national champions – Shawnee State and Georgetown,” Ray says. “We’ve seen what it takes.”
He thinks the Saints have what it takes. “Most teams are bigger than us and most are more athletic than us but these guys are tough – and they’re used to winning.”
They do something else: “We put a high premium on taking care of the ball,” Ray says of his No. 4 team in the nation in shooting percentage (50.3 percent on 29.5 for 58.6 shots a game). “Shooting percentages are directly correlated to decision-making. It’s not your shot, it’s our shot.
“You have to convince them not to try to do too much, to trust the system,” which Ray says is a hybrid-Princeton offense that his Christian Brothers college coach Mike Nienaber, out of Cincinnati LaSalle, developed and one he was allowed to install as a young assistant at Mt. St. Joseph’s.
But any system is only as good as its players and three of them jump to mind here. Six-foot-6 play-everywhere junior Ryan Batte, the Mid-South Player of the Year, Cincinnati Oak Hills product and Ashland transfer didn’t play basketball for a year-and-a-half before “turning himself into one of the best players in the country,” Ray says of Batte, who can shoot it from deep (34.7 percent), pass it (2.8 assists a game), rebound it (7.1 a game) and score (21.2 points a game on 54.1 percent shooting).
But an example of where TMU has really made a move is the way 6-5 sophomore Reid Jolly out of Campbell County High, and 6-9 sophomore Noah Pack (Georgetown, Ohio) have shared a position with Jolly’s back and ankle issues allowing Pack to be in effect a sixth starter. Now back and fully healthy, Jolly (13.3 ppg on 54.0 percent shooting with 5.7 rebounds) just seems to be in the right place at the right time. And Pack, scoring at 9.3 points a game off the bench on 56.8 percent shooting with 6.8 rebounds, seems to be the pick-me-up TMU needs wherever he plays.
“Pack has done a great job in his role, he’s embraced it,” Ray says. And Jolly, after time off for a degenerative back disc issue and then another two weeks for an ankle sprain, “he’s in really good shape now,” Ray says of the 205-pounder.
“I thought this had the potential to be a special season,” Ray says.
It already is. But it’s not over yet.
