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.
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.
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?”
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…
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