Say goodbye – and good luck – to the nationally ranked Saints. They’re off to the shores of the mighty Missouri. For the Thomas More women, with two NCAA basketball championships in the past decade, it’s a return trip to Sioux City, Iowa, for the NAIA 16-team national championships.
For the TMU men, it took a bit more doing to punch their first-ever ticket to the 84th renewal of the NAIA’s National Basketball Championship, the grand-daddy of them all, in Kansas City.
But with a roof-raising crowd at the Connor Convocation Center in Crestview Hills cheering them on when they most needed it, well, your work is finished.
AD Terry Connor can order another bus. Thomas More went two for two Saturday.
THOMAS MORE MEN 80, STILLMAN COLLEGE 67
No way, not again. For those Northern Kentucky basketball fans who had had to sit through NKU’s agonizing collapse Tuesday, as the Norse were on the cusp of an NCAA trip with everything going their way in the Horizon championship, and then it all went away in one of those gut-punch reversals of fate, could it be happening again?
Could it be happening to Northern Kentucky’s other team, a Thomas More team leading by 16 points, 54-38, with a little more than 15 minutes left. And then? And then the Stillman College Tigers, out of Tuscaloosa, Ala., starting chipping away. First it was a 10-2 run that eventually lengthened out to 25-13.
Do the math. Thomas More’s 54-38 lead had been whittled down to 65-63 with
3:20 left and Stillman was playing with all kinds of confidence. Uh oh. Here we go.
“I was getting lots of help, lots of time-out signals from the crowd,” Thomas More Coach Justin Ray said. But he had just two left and he wasn’t going to panic. “We tell our players to keep their poise, the coach has to do the same . . . We were getting good looks, they just weren’t going in.”
But Ray also has this kind of relationship with his players. “I told them you got yourselves into this, now get yourselves out of it,” he laughed. And darned if they didn’t.
But don’t take Ray’s word for it. Listen to Stillman Coach John Teasley. “They hit big shots to win it,” Teasley said. “We had hands in their faces. That’s a great team.”
The only problem: Of all the big shots and big plays Thomas More had to make to stop the skid, which was the biggest? Ryan Batte’s score stopped the first 10-2 run with 10:15 left. But he didn’t think that was it.
Six-foot-eight sophomore Noah Pack’s flying rebound over a crowd and score to build TMU’s 63-57 lead to eight with 5:00 left might have been the night’s most-impressive athletic play for the Saints. For that alone, maybe it was Pack’s play.
But then two more times, Stillman narrowed it to two on the strength of 6-7 post man Londell King, 65-63 and 67-65, only to see Reid Jolly get open on back-to-back possessions for scores in the lane.
Then Pack hit a three after a stop and it sounded like they might need a new roof on the Connor Center as the Saints went up seven with just 1:30 left. Garren Bertsch’s four points with two each from Batte and Jolly down the stretch gave the Saints the deceptive final 13-point margin.
“That’s a great team we played,” Stillman’s Teasley said, and he should know. “We played the toughest schedule in the country.”
But Teasley had another word for his team’s trip to Northern Kentucky. “I’ll say this about Thomas More. I’ve been a lot of places and there was zero negativity here . . . their fans just cheered for their team.” But not against the Tigers, who did have fans here even though it might not have looked like it.
“We had two,” Teasley said as he named them.
Batte, the Mid-South Conference MVP, and Jolly led TMU with 20 points each. Pack, off the bench, added 12 with key rebounds and steals. Luke Rudy also had 12 points for a TMU team that hit on 29 of 56 (51.8 percent) to Stillman’s 50.8 (31 of 61).
Big difference turned out to be TMU’s ability to defend without fouling, allowing Stillman just four free throws (they made two) while TMU was converting 14 of 17.
“We’ve been in that situation before,” Batte said of the nationally fifth-ranked Saints, “we trust each other.”
Ray talked about it. A year ago in this same situation, at home with a game to go to get to Kansas City, the Saints lost to Morningside. “We fell short.” And they talked about how that felt for those players who would never get another chance.
But this team did. “I thought they (Stillman’s Tigers) were going to make a run,” Ray said. “And these guys made plays. They punched us and we punched back.”
“The better team won tonight,” Teasley said. The Saints, now 29-4, would agree the way they finished. Now it’s on to Kansas City and a date against SAGU (Southwestern Assemblies of God University, Waxahachie, Texas) at 4 p.m. ET Friday.
THOMAS MORE WOMEN 86, GRAND VIEW (IOWA) 62
Refocused and re-charged, the Thomas More women jumped on Grand View early Saturday and pretty much quickly assured their return to Sioux City, Iowa, and the 16-team NAIA Women’s Nationals Championships.
And they did it the way the Saints so often do – in waves. In the two games of
the regional finals, Thomas More has gotten 100 points from its bench – 58 against Haskell and 42 more against Grand View.
The Saints will open Thursday at 7 p.m. ET in Sioux City against a Bryan (Tenn.) team that beat Mid-South member Pikeville 90-86 in overtime.
“They’re able to score at all three levels,” Grand View Coach Kelli Greenway said. And what might be unusual for a team to have a dozen players score as TMU did Saturday, “it’s usual for Thomas More,” Greenway said. “It’s all so balanced.”
Guard Zoie Barth and backup center Alex Smith continued their hot hands to lead the Saints with 15 points apiece, Smith getting hers in just 17 minutes off the bench for starter Alexah Chrisman, who was limited to 10 minutes with foul trouble.
Next scorer in line was also off the bench, Summer Secrist, whose 10 points
came in 18 minutes.
For Barth, the new life after a couple of losses late in the season for the 27-4 Saints came from the simplest of solutions. “It’s spring break . . . I’ve been able to get back in the gym. Watching the ball go through the net helps.”
For TMU, it happened 34 times in 65 shots (52.3 percent) as the Saints took advantage of Grand View’s efforts to shut down their outside shooting by finding the open cutter to the basket.
Defensively TMU held Grand View to 31.5 percent (17 of 54) even though the Iowa team cashed in on 13 three-pointers including seven of their first eight field goals.
“What a great atmosphere,” TMU Coach Jeff Hans said of a near-capacity arena including the players, coaches and fans from Grand View’s men’s team that had played TMU Friday night, “after last year . . . and a season where Covid took so much away from sports.
And now they’re back “11 or 12 deep,” as Barth said. “That’s the special thing about this team,” Hans said. “We can create different mismatches . . . that’s the best Alex (Smith) has played in a while.”
But now “the challenge is to do it in a different place with different refs, in a different atmosphere and against teams that don’t know about us and we don’t know about them,” Barth said.
“The challenge is to embrace the moment, to live in the moment. Coach has
been emphasizing that you’ve got to have fun,” Barth said. Which is what the last two tournament games have been all about with the nationally third-ranked Saints winning by an average 35 ½ points.
It didn’t seem like that kind of romp with TMU leading by 30, 76-46, with 8:25 left. “Not when you look at the stats,” Greenway said. It seemed like a competitive game. With one big difference.
“It was a case of us not getting stops,” Greenway said. And Thomas More getting scores. Lots and lots of scores.
And now the Saints will see if they can do it away from Northern Kentucky.
Dan Weber is the sports editor-at-large for Link nky.
