ST. PAUL, Minn. — Doors open for Beach Night with a feels-like temperature of 7 degrees and purple aloha shirts for the first 250 students through — a true commitment to the bit. But the party is on inside, already. Crudites and chicken skewers are disappearing apace; an open bar is working like a bug light. Decades of St. Thomas men’s basketball alums are filing into a private reception, sorting through rosters and info sheets for a soon-to-open $175 million arena, warming up the space for one of their own.
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Johnny Tauer, Ph.D., walks in at 6:26 p.m. The four-shot almond milk latte in his right hand tracks.
Five years ago, he was a Division III coach and tenured psychology professor at his alma mater, driving a forest green minivan and living in his childhood home. On this Saturday in February, Tauer is a Division I coach who doesn’t teach or drive a minivan anymore but still lives in the same house five minutes from campus. His team plays for first place in the Summit League at the top of the hour. It’s a hell of a thing, to do what’s never been done before without going anywhere.
For now, Tauer, 52, belongs here. In this room at the Anderson Athletics Complex, to these people, some of whom he played with, some of whom he coached at his eponymous summer camp or St. Thomas — or both. He jokes about getting a free orange juice at Scooter’s during his recruiting visit. Calls out Petey and Lau and Tommy in the crowd. Draws guffaws by mimicking the timeout calls of his old coach, Steve Fritz, who’s sitting along the wall and laughing, too. Tauer apologizes if it feels like a sauna in here, then notes it might not be much better in a sold-out 1,800-seat gym.
“You kind of pinch yourself,” Tauer says, “because these are the nights that are about as good as it gets in college basketball, short of March Madness.”
That last part lands hard. The best college basketball story of March is, arguably, the story no one will hear about most of March. The St. Thomas Tommies, basically kicked out of Division III six years ago, bold enough to make a first-of-its-kind leap to Division I, driven by a local who quotes Aristotle and Kant, good enough to earn a bid to the NCAA Tournament … well, they can’t play in the NCAA Tournament. Not until 2026, per the conditions of their transition.
Cinderella, without a slipper.
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Which is not the same as the end of the story.
The school’s stress test of identity — one eye on something bigger, and one eye on the way it’s always been — might be as fascinating as what preceded it. Before he leaves the reception, Tauer urges alums to help capitalize on this momentum. He talks about an opportunity to be the most special mid-major program in the country, doing everything just how they’ve done it since Fritz was in charge: Value every opportunity. And make the correct decisions when it’s time.
“In many ways, it’s a metaphor for life,” Tauer says. “You get the ball; what are you going to do with it?”
In 1920, seven schools founded the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. One of them retained its charm — they still say you’ll marry the person you kiss under the arches off Summit Avenue — while also growing some noticeable muscles over the next century. The College of St. Thomas became a coed university, its five-figure enrollment dwarfed that of conference peers, and its athletics teams dominated, winning 33 MIAC all-sports trophies, including 12 straight beginning in 2007-08. In theory, when Phil Esten became his alma mater’s new athletic director in January 2019, he took the helm of a self-driving tank.
A couple days in, Esten met with the league’s then-commissioner, Carlyle Carter. Esten quickly learned the rumors about the MIAC’s unhappiness with St. Thomas were a fait accompli: Conference presidents wanted to boot the Tommies for being too big and too good. Five months later, they officially did so: At the end of the 2020-21 school year, St. Thomas was “involuntarily removed” from an organization for which it helped lay the bricks. “It was very jarring for alumni and for the community and for college athletics,” Esten says now. “For those of us that had been living it for the four or five months leading up to it, it was, OK, next steps. How do we quickly pivot?”
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Among the jarred was a professor alternately working out of a John R. Roach Center classroom and Schoenecker Arena, the cozy basketball gym nestled inside the school’s athletics complex. Johnny Tauer grew up in St. Paul. He scored 1,200-plus points for St. Thomas, earning a spot in the school’s athletic hall of fame. He pursued a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, didn’t plan on returning to teach, then wound up doing so after an instructor in social psychology died and a job opened. He won 185 games and a national championship in eight seasons after taking over for Fritz as men’s basketball coach. This took an eraser to all of that providence.
“I mean, there was an element of like, OK, this is where we’ve been for 100 years,” Tauer says, “and there aren’t logical solutions.”
So they went with the beanstalk ride into the sky.
Not long after the MIAC made its proclamation, Esten heard from then-Summit League commissioner Tom Douple. Unbeknownst to anyone, Douple had visited St. Thomas’ campus while in town for the 2019 Final Four in Minneapolis. Now he broached the idea of the Tommies joining the conference for basketball and other sports besides football and hockey — the Summit League didn’t sponsor those — which merely required a move from Division III straight to Division I without the standard Division II layover.
For a university aiming at national visibility, it was intriguing. The only issue: No school had tried it. But when St. Thomas and the Summit League contacted the NCAA to determine if such a leap was even possible, they found amenability where the wall of red tape was expected to be. By October, St. Thomas accepted a Summit League invitation, with Douple labeling the school “the full package.” The following July, the NCAA granted a first-of-its-kind Division III-to-Division I transition waiver. The Tommies wouldn’t skip steps as much as take on a couple big ones at once.
“If you look at our profile — our enrollment, our endowment — we do look a lot more like Creighton and Marquette and Loyola-Chicago and DePaul than we do the other schools in (the MIAC),” Tauer says. “I think a lot of people would say this may have worked out in the best for the teams in the MIAC and what they wanted, and where St. Thomas is headed.”
Of course, when you say you want to be a Division I school, the NCAA expects you to act like one. St. Thomas, ever striving, obliged.
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A full floor of university flex space was renovated into new offices for football and both basketball programs. A dance studio transformed into a fueling station for all athletes. An athletic department of 33 full-time staffers grew to more than 100. The problem of a hockey venue unsuitable for Division I? Benefactors Lee and Penny Anderson solved that with a $75 million lead gift, which spurred the construction of an on-campus arena that will be the new home for St. Thomas’ hockey and basketball programs and an operations hub for five other sports. “I am absolutely blown away that, in Year 4, we’re going to be playing in arguably one of the best arenas in the Midwest for our level — or any level,” says Tommies associate head coach Mike Maker, who previously ran programs in both Division I (Marist) and Division III (Williams College).
But the “monumental jump,” as Maker puts it, does not include NCAA Tournament eligibility. Not yet. Provisional membership requires schools to meet a set of benchmarks, such as scholarships offered and staffing and compliance regulations met, before it awards full membership and access to championships. The NCAA voted in January to reduce St. Thomas’ transition period by a year, assuming the school meets certain criteria by June. But the provisional pause on postseason appearances couldn’t be skipped.
So a team with a better KenPom.com rating than nine power conference programs as of mid-February could win the Summit League tournament this weekend … and then plunge into the offseason, because it can’t use the March Madness invitation it would earn. (The automatic bid would go to the team with the best regular-season conference record.) “I wouldn’t say it’s a bummer,” senior forward Kendall Blue says. “I think it’s just another reason why they should let us go, you know?”
Blue laughs. He knows it’s not that simple. None of this is simple.
St. Thomas brags on its charm but also wears its ambition in plain sight. It wants to be the same and different, in a hurry. It’s fair to wonder if it’s worth the trouble, too, especially at a time when college basketball and college hockey aren’t necessarily drivers to national Division I prominence.
As it happens, there’s a doctor in the house, and his specialty is figuring out why anyone does anything.
While Johnny Tauer played on state championship basketball and baseball teams at Cretin-Derham Hall High – tales of beating out Chris Weinke for the starting first base gig are greatly exaggerated, he insists – he always wondered why the guys with more talent weren’t motivated to work as compulsively as he did. He then followed his father’s footsteps to St. Thomas, but not much farther. John Tauer was a golf captain and Class of 1963 grad who went into finance. Johnny stuck with basketball and, while aptitude tests suggested the younger Tauer go into actuarial science, a sophomore-year psychology course rendered everything else moot.
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“I was getting like a D-plus, and I loved it,” Johnny Tauer says. “That’s what fascinated me. What makes people tick.”
The desire to do something because you love it — to do it for its own sake – is essentially his life’s work.
Tauer has published scholarly papers, essays and a book on “WOSPs” (Well-Intentioned, Overinvolved Sports Parents). “Winning Isn’t Everything: Competition, Achievement Orientation, and Intrinsic Motivation” is a paper published while he was in grad school, in which Tauer argued that competition doesn’t affect motivation negatively, as many had written; it increases the enjoyment in those highly motivated to achieve. “The Effects of Cooperation and Competition on Intrinsic Motivation and Performance” landed in 2004, based on Tauer’s dissertation plus five summers of data collection at his basketball camp; he concluded that combining cooperation and competition optimized motivation instead of working as opposing concepts.
It’s plainly sports psychology at its stem, the obsession of someone fully invested in moving a disparate group in one direction. The cooperation and competition paper even begins with a tremendously Minnesota guy quote from former Twins first baseman Kent Hrbek: “I’d much rather win the World Series. Then you can go out and get drunk with 25 other guys. If you win the MVP, you get to go out and get drunk by yourself. What fun is that?”
Tauer also didn’t ask to be a Division I coach. Circumstances foisted the responsibility on someone who calls himself “wildly boring,” who orders the same hulking $6 omelet every day, who says he’s perfectly satisfied biking for miles while listening to podcasts when the weather permits. He was content to teach — “Nobody writes about you when you have a bad lecture, right?” Tauer says — and coach in a world that got him home by 10:15 p.m. after almost any conference game.
“When you feel like you can have all the things personally and professionally that you want,” Tauer says, “you better be careful messing with happy.”
And that’s the point.
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Johnny Tauer didn’t have to choose between anything. He loves basketball. He loves St. Paul, and St. Paul loves him. “He could probably run for mayor and be unaffiliated with a party, and he’d have a legitimate chance to win a seat,” says former assistant Dennis Harrington. And becoming a Division I coach just … happened. No change of address form required.
“It was easy for me to get on board in the sense of, what an opportunity,” Tauer says. “So now part of the question is, how good can we get?”
The program’s ethos – VALUE YOUR TEAMMATES. VALUE THE BALL is painted on one wall of Tauer’s office — would be strained as much as anything by consistently better competition. In their first year of Division I men’s basketball, the Tommies recorded one dunk. But they also threatened the NCAA record for fewest turnovers per game — the 8.1 miscues on average was a touch sloppier than Wisconsin’s 7.4 in 2014-15. They won 10 games with a roster of players who were in Division III a year prior. There was also a 12-game losing streak and a road trip during which Tauer got vertigo and had to crawl back to his hotel room after a meeting. But those struggles at a new level amounted to “the best pressure test of our culture, ever,” in Tauer’s estimation.
St. Thomas won 19 games the following season, and its 71 total wins in Division I are second most ever through the first four years of transition. (Grand Canyon had 81.) As of March 2, the Tommies’ 197-spot improvement in the NCAA’s NET rankings over four years was the fifth-largest improvement nationally in that stretch. And this 22-win season, specifically, looks like indelible proof of concept.
Like most analytically driven teams, St. Thomas prioritizes layups, free throws and unguarded 3-point looks. But most analytically driven teams have been giving out scholarships for more than four years. On the morning after the regular season ended with an 18th straight home win, the Tommies ranked second nationally in effective field goal percentage (58.0), eighth in 2-point percentage (58.4), 14th in 3-point percentage (38.3) and 17th nationally in free-throw accuracy (78.4). No player, meanwhile, averaged more than junior Miles Barnstable’s 14.7 points per game and the team-wide turnover rate was a glistening 13.8 percent.
“Be unselfish and be smart,” says Barnstable, who spent his first two seasons at Division III Wisconsin-Whitewater. “You’ll end up being in the flow of the game if you’re unselfish.”
Or as third-leading scorer Drake Dobbs puts it: “A lot of places, it’s really structured and you get to almost be robotic. Which isn’t a bad thing. That’s just how some programs are. But here it’s pretty much complete freedom.”
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The offense is basically a fever dream of Princeton offense concepts melded with the scheme former West Virginia and Michigan coach John Beilein ran, with a dose of serendipity. While Tauer appreciated those West Virginia offenses from afar, he had no idea Maker was an assistant coach on that Mountaineers staff. Nor did he know Maker would lose the Marist job in 2018 and move to the Twin Cities so his wife could coach the cross country team at St. Olaf College. Neither knew they’d be having coffee in St. Paul, talking about a Division I program right down the street, developing an attack that’s been translatable in part because it’s somewhat un-scoutable; the Tommies just go where you aren’t.
“They’re not plays,” Maker says. “They’re movements based on how the defense is guarding you, and you need to take advantage of that.”
It is indeed a philosophy. It is Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, memorized by Johnny Tauer years ago in a class he hated, now running through the spine of a college basketball program: I ought not to act except in such a way that I can also will that my actions should become universal law.
He has it the way he wants it. St. Thomas will have access to the grandest stage in the sport, soon enough, while Tauer can make impromptu coffee dates with his wife, Chancey, and 3-year-old daughter, Issa, and keep tabs on three sons in the area. (Jack attends St. Norbert College, Adam is a Tommies walk-on and RQ is a junior at Cretin-Derham Hall.) He can run a program that both competes with power league squads and is totally fine with longtime bus driver Stevie Lanz eating takeout ribs in the front row during film sessions in Kansas City. It’s as Tauer tells his players all the time: Life isn’t easy. But it can be simple.
“The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior,” Tauer says. “If I wanted to go somewhere else, then I would have gone somewhere else a long time ago.”
On a relatively quiet February afternoon – there’s no point in doing construction if the materials won’t hold up to a high temperature of minus 2 – a stroll through Lee & Penny Anderson Arena requires a hard hat and a little imagination. Hydrotherapy tubs are covered by a massive wood slat. One basketball practice gym has a fresh coat of paint but the other is mainly a dining area for workers. The lower concourse and auxiliary ice sheet are, basically, dirt. Nine cranes clutter what will be the arena floor.
Still, the shape of the endeavor is clear.
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This is a $175 million audacity.
“There’s not another school that has this,” says Cory Chapman, St. Thomas’ deputy athletic director for internal development. “It’s truly a unicorn.”
It’s a claim based on seven sports operating out of one facility, but semantics and superlatives aren’t the point. Existence is. There is nothing homey about a state-of-the-art arena rising out of the ground in mere months. This is a school, and by extension a men’s hoops program (among others), thinking about itself differently, up to and including semi-unspoken aspirations about catching the attention of the Big East one of these days.
On the other side of campus, Johnny Tauer runs practice in the same complex that hosts his summer camp, now going into its 30th year. That first summer, his mother and father took the calls and scribbled names on a yellow legal pad. Camp ran two weeks and cost $60. A total of 25 kids showed up. The next year it was 100. The year after that, 200. By the summer of 2019, attendance pushed 2,000. Names like Chet Holmgren and Jalen Suggs have come through as grade-schoolers, as the camp went from a college senior’s bright idea to a rite of passage.
Things have started real small and gotten real big here before.
But as fancy as the new arena will be, the Johnny Tauer Basketball Camp will continue inside the current 1,800-seat home gym and on the intramural courts one floor up. Same as ever, or at least the last 15 years. It’s not along for the ride on the roller-coaster that Division I transition has been, to use Tauer’s analogy. It’s a part of St. Thomas that will be what it’s been for decades. The rest of the year, everyone can hold on to the sides and await what’s at the end of the track.
“I’ve said I think this is the coolest story in college basketball,” Tauer says. “That doesn’t make it right. But I think it is. So it’s right for me.”
(Illustration: Meech Robinson / The Athletic; photos: Courtesy of University of St. Thomas)
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