When he was a senior at Morton High School, Luke Gregerson was looking for any college that might be interested in him as a baseball player.
None was, until Saint Xavier University coach Mike Dooley got in touch.
Saint Who? Say what?
“I never knew it existed before then,” said Gregerson, whose high school is only 15 miles from the main campus of the 163-year-old college on the Far South Side of Chicago.
Shortstop John O’Brien of Lake Zurich High School, now a senior at SXU, had the same initial reaction. And Saint Xavier athletic director Bob Hallberg almost always gets the “Where are you located?” question when he goes to a far-flung outpost like Des Plaines.
The answer is Saint Xavier is the location of an athletic program that, in the past decade, has found a road map to overall sports success impressive for any school at any level.
This fall’s season is a good example.
The football team reached the semifinals of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics tournament for the second time in four years. The women’s cross-country team qualified for a third straight NAIA championship meet — only 32 schools qualify out of the 212 with women’s cross-country teams — and it twice has finished in the top 20. The men’s soccer team made its conference semifinal and finished with a 13-5-1 record.
The program also includes men’s and women’s basketball teams that each have won more than 70 percent of their games since 2002 and now are ranked in the Top 10. The women’s softball team made the NAIA tournament in 2004 and 2009. The baseball program has produced four major-leaguers, among them Gregerson, who finished fourth in voting for the MLB Setup Man of the Year award after a 2009 rookie season with the Padres — in which he made 72 appearances.
It has gotten to this point by recruiting athletes from the talent-rich high schools, especially Catholic high schools along the “southwest corridor” — from Joliet to the campus at 103rd Street and Pulaski Road — where many of its coaches grew up; by using sports to create academic opportunity and enhance campus life in what was an all-women’s college until 1969; and by providing athletes and coaches with consistent support from the administration.
“We have above-average facilities, a great coaching staff and a tremendous recruiting area,” said Steven Murphy, Saint Xavier’s vice president for university advancement. “We offer an opportunity for friends and family to see you play and a program good enough that you will have the opportunity to participate in national tournaments.”
Saint Xavier has an athletic budget — operations and salaries — of $2.3 million. That is about what your average football coach at a Big Ten school probably spends each year on text messages to recruits because the average annual Big Ten athletic budget is just about the same — $80 million — as Saint Xavier’s entire annual university budget.
Its athletic scholarship budget is $2.1 million. To cover annual tuition, room and board costs of about $30,000, athletes also rely on academic scholarships, much coming from federal or state grants at a school where 91.7 percent of all students get financial aid.
“Every time we look at the numbers, we conclude sports is a winning situation for Saint Xavier,” Murphy said.
Athletes are expected to pay for some of their own equipment: shoes for football players and cross-country runners, shoes and gloves for baseball players. Economic conditions pushed the university to cut all its budgets; Hallberg’s operating budget dropped 16 percent, leading coaches to do more fundraising for both necessities and the occasional meal after a game.
“Our coaches know how to make the money dance,” said John Pelrine, Saint Xavier’s vice president for student affairs.
“Saint Xavier offers a model for the role athletics can play when it is done well,” said Christine Wiseman, the Loyola University provost who will become Saint Xavier’s president in June. “The athletic program is central to the university, and it is not the kind of program that causes it to come into conflict with academics.”
The athletic program has been respectable since the school began it with a men’s basketball team in 1970 and a baseball team coached by John Boles — who went on to manage the Florida Marlins — in 1973.
When Hallberg told Sister Irenaeus Chekouras, then the university president, that he wanted to build a baseball field, she said that was fine as long as Saint Xavier didn’t have to contribute a penny.
Hallberg raised money by running rock concerts every Friday in the school’s old, cramped gym — three local bands in their formative years — Styx, the New Colony Six and Ides of March — were key attractions.
But the event that changed the entire face of both Saint Xavier’s athletic program and campus life was in 1999 when the Shannon Center opened. “For great things to happen at a place, someone has to have a vision,” said Dooley, whose baseball team has had just one losing season since he became its head coach in 1993. “That was Dick Yanikoski.”
Yanikoski, now president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, was Saint Xavier’s president from 1994 through 2003. He took a financial flier on the $11.5 million Shannon Center, signing promissory notes and raising funds later. It gave the school not only a basketball arena but a space seating 3,200 that could be used for large lectures and convocations, plus a student fitness center, an indoor track and an indoor training area.
Since the Shannon Center was built, school officials say that overall undergraduate enrollment has grown 29 percent to 3,084, 70 percent of them women, while the increase in male enrollment has jumped 41 percent.
The coaching hires under Yanikoski’s watch were also critical.
Men’s basketball coach Tom O’Malley, whose first season was 1997-98, turned a successful program into a powerhouse that has won 30 games three times this decade. Hallberg came back to be the first (and only) head coach of a women’s basketball team that has a .746 winning percentage since the program began play in 2000-01.
And then there is Mike Feminis, who took over a football program in 1999 that had won just eight of 59 games since its inaugural season in 1993. After one losing year, his teams are 85-33, capped by a 13-1 record this year.
“We recruit the best players from the Chicago area that don’t get Division I scholarships,” Feminis said. “That sounds simplistic, but 99.9 percent of high school players don’t get them. We just hope some want to stay close to home.”
Tenth-year softball coach Myra Minuskin takes a different perspective on the same general approach.
“We recruit Division I-caliber athletes. My biggest challenge is to sell the NAIA to kids who have that Division I dream,” said Minuskin, whose teams have a .680 winning percentage.
Yanikoski said in a telephone interview that Saint Xavier considered moving into NCAA Division III or Division II. For reasons related to travel cost as well as academic standards, it has stayed put in the NAIA, which has 290 member schools.
“The way I look at it, there is NCAA Division I and everyone else,” Hallberg said. “Sometimes it’s better to be a big fish in a small pond.”
Lane Tech’s Xavier Torres dove into it after spending one year as a redshirt defensive back at Division I Central Michigan, where Brian Kelly — just named to coach Notre Dame — was the coach. Torres, a junior majoring in pre-pharmacy, wanted to be closer to home and to play wide receiver again; this season, he caught 72 passes for 1,139 yards and 13 touchdowns.
“I saw an opportunity for football to be fun again,” Torres said of his transfer.
Fun, family, football: that is how Murphy describes an atmosphere in where the players’ families fill a weight room with crock pots to feed the players after home games at Bruce R. Deaton Memorial Field.
The facility, which also serves the soccer teams, got a $1.5 million FieldTurf surface three years ago and lights two years ago.
Saint Xavier has no such pie-in-the sky illusions.
“We do this because it is good developmentally and adds to the quality of campus life,” Pelrine said. “Of course, having winners is better than having losers.”
Knowing your place can be as important as finding it.
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Sizing up the Saint Xavier athletic programs
Football
(since 2002)
*72-24 overall record (.750 winning percentage)
*Five NAIA postseason appearances (2002, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009)
*Qualified for the NAIA semifinals twice (2006, 2009)
*Ranked as high as No. 2 nationally (2007)
*Four MSFA titles (2002, 2003, 2005, 2009)
C. Country (W)
*Three straight appearances at the NAIA National Cross-Country Championships
*Placed 24th nationally at 2009 NAIA National Cross-Country Championships
Soccer (W)
*113-55-9 overall record (.661 winning percentage)
*51-19-2 CCAC record (.712 winning percentage)
Basketball (W)
(since 2000-01)
*231-76 overall record (.752 winning percentage)
*82-18 Chicagoland Collegiate Athletic Conference record (.820 win percentage)
*Ranked No. 3 in the NAIA for highest national ranking (2006-07)
*Three NAIA national tournament Sweet 16 appearances (2006, 2007, 2009)
Basketball (M)
(since 2002-03)
*187-80 overall record (.722 winning percentage)
*45-19 CCAC record (.700 winning percentage)
Baseball
(since 2003)
*267-150-1 overall record (.640 winning percentage)
*126-22 CCAC record (.851 winning percentage)
*NAIA World Series appearance (2006)
Softball
(since 2003)
*248-127 overall record (.661 winning percentage)
*101-21 CCAC record (.828 winning percentage)
*Two NAIA national tournament appearances (2004, 2009)
Cumulative team record (since 2002-03): 1305-759-23 (.631 win percentage)
Cumulative conference record (since 2002-03): 543-154-8 (.776 win percentage)
13 varsity teams: football, women’s volleyball, men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s cross country, men’s and women’s basketball, men’s volleyball (added this year), men’s and women’s track (indoor and outdoor), baseball and softball.
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phersh@tribune.com
