Land of 51 Schools, #1: Augsburg
Traveling, on a smaller scale
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Eli: Hello! You’re probably familiar with our friend Nik’s Traveling series, in which he documents his journey to visit every Division I basketball arena in the country.
I share this dream, and I feel comfortable saying David does too, but man. There are over 350 of those. That’s a lot.
Nevertheless, the travel bug beckons, and we’re always looking for new ways to experience the sports we love.
So here’s what we’ll do instead! Over the next…who knows how long, David and I are going to attempt to take in a sporting event at every college that sponsors intercollegiate athletics in our home state of Minnesota. Unlike Nik, we’re not restricting ourselves to basketball; we plan to branch out to other sports throughout the series.
This is a less ambitious project than Traveling, but it’s still gonna take a long, long time. I combed through all three divisions of the NCAA and David sifted through the NJCAA, ACCA, NIAC, and probably a million other intercollegiate athletics associations I’ve never even heard of. We found a total of 51 schools.
If we visited one of these every week in the school year, it’d take us almost a year and a half to complete our journey, but there’s a 0% chance we’re gonna work that fast, so this will definitely take years. Here’s hoping we’re all still around in 2028!
Regardless of how long this takes, we do (hopefully) intend on finishing it. We both love our North Star State more than words can express, and we’ll more than happily take any excuse to drive around to every hidden corner of it.
Welcome to the Land of 51 Schools!
Eli: We wanted to kick the series off with a gimme—something that wouldn’t be too much of a commitment in time, money, or effort—to make sure this was actually something we wanted to do. Thankfully, we live in Minneapolis and have a ton of Division III schools right in our backyard.
We knew we wanted our first game to be men’s basketball, so which school we visited first was just a matter of fitting it into our schedule.
Eenie, meenie, miney…Augsburg. Home of the Auggies: proud members of the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (MIAC).
The Matchup
AUGSBURG Auggies (5-10, 3-7 MIAC) vs. ST. SCHOLASTICA Saints (2-13, 1-8 MIAC)
Sport: Men’s basketball
Date: Wednesday, January 17, 2024 — 19:00
Venue: Si Melby Hall | Minneapolis (capacity 2,200)
Attendance: 203 (9.2%)
The Campus
Eli: Augsburg University sits on a fairly small campus near the Mississippi River in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis. It’s just across Riverside Avenue from the West Bank campus of the University of Minnesota, whose enrollment outnumbers Augsburg’s by a factor of over 14:1.
Getting here is easy. We walked from our apartment, so we didn’t have too much to think about, but Cedar-Riverside is served by both of the Metro Transit light rail lines and quite a few bus lines. It’s also not quite downtown, so driving and parking aren’t a total nightmare.
A litany of lecture and residence halls, most of which are standard brick and glass, show their age pretty easily. They’re surrounded by a somewhat surprising amount of greenspace, making the campus seem bigger than it actually is.
Near the eastern edge of campus, nestled southeast of the corner of Riverside and 23rd, lies Si Melby Hall.
The Venue
Eli: We’d been walking a couple miles in about 0°F temps when we arrived, so we tried to enter the closest doors we could. But, somewhat unintuitively, the doors closest to the Riverside Avenue streetscape are not the entrance open for sporting events—the doors on the southwest side of the building are—so the closest doors were locked.
However, just as we were about to turn around and look for the real entrance, a student sitting at a table inside the entryway noticed us and let us in. We’d bought our tickets online before the game (about $8.50 each after fees and taxes for general admission—cheap entertainment), but this student unwittingly allowed us to bypass the ticket scanner entirely, so I guess we didn’t have to. Oh well. We’re honest folk and local college athletics deserve our money.
The first thing you’d notice if you entered the correct way is the frankly absurd collection of men’s wrestling trophies.
Men’s wrestling is one of five sports Si Melby Hall hosts, along with men’s and women’s basketball, women’s volleyball, and the new women’s wrestling program that began competition in 2019. We were unaware of the sheer prowess of the men’s wrestling program when we entered the building, but it would be impossible to remain unaware by the time we left. Maybe we should have come to a wrestling match instead. Ah well, we already made our choice.
We entered the gym and the Division III-ness of it all just smacked us straight across the face.
In the nicest way possible, this is a high school gym. It’s got a rustic charm that you really only get at the lowest levels of scholastic athletics. If the phrase “for love of the game” was a gym, it would be Si Melby Hall.
The building was originally completed in 1961 and most recently renovated in 2000, and boy can you tell. The scoreboards look straight out of the late ‘90s, complete with era-appropriate Pepsi and Mountain Dew logos. The sound system is blown out, probably because there’s no leveling between the unnecessarily loud buzzers and everything else.
Given our tickets were general admission, we could roam the gym as freely as we wished. There weren’t that many places to roam, so we just spent 10 minutes in each of four different spots: courtside and the very back row on each side of the gym.
We started courtside on the far side, as shown above, and retreated to the back row halfway through the first half. That’s about when the Augsburg men’s wrestling dynasty became impossible to ignore.
We also noticed this.
David is not a giant—he’s six-foot-nothing—and he could flat-palm the ceiling without tiptoeing. I’m 5’5” and I could touch the ceiling but couldn’t quite palm it without stretching. There was also a lot of give to some of the ceiling tiles, making me wonder how possible it would have been to remove one or two of them, climb into the ceiling and crawl directly over the court. Someone lighter than us, please test this out and report back.
Of course, this would be easier from the near side of the court because the ceiling is somehow even lower on that end.
Some of the players in this game would certainly hit their heads on the ceiling if they tried to sit this far up. We triple-checked and each set of bleachers has the same number of rows, so either the ceiling is built at a slight slant or the bleachers are asymmetrical in height. Either way, you just don’t get this at The Barn!
From the near side of the court, we also had a better view of the banners honoring three Augsburg greats, including a legendary coach I had no idea was an alumnus.
Alongside Augsburg’s two NBA draft picks—Dan Anderson in 1965 and first-round pick Devean George in 1999—is the late Basketball Hall-of-Famer Lute Olson. I knew Olson was born and raised in North Dakota. I did not know he played for Augsburg for three years. You learn something new every day!
At halftime, we strolled the concourse and checked out the concession offerings. It was pretty standard fare.
Chips were on sale for $1 instead of $2—what a steal! We each got a hot dog. They were nothing to write home about.
While on the concourse, we also noticed a few students head down a stairwell. We followed them out of curiosity and found that it led to an entire student fitness center nestled directly below the varsity basketball court. It’s probably the most modern part of the entire building and it’s neatly hidden from view unless you know exactly where to look.
Everything else, right down to the lack of security measures taken upon entering the building, is a portal straight back to the year 2000. We both thoroughly enjoyed it.
The Experience
David: There’s something really special about basketball like this. It’s not good basketball—if it were, it wouldn’t be played in gyms like this for crowds in the low triple digits—but it’s some of the most fun I’ve ever had watching a game.
From the very beginning, it was clear that this was going to be different. While Minnesota and other high-level programs will run through your typical rotation of hype music pre-tip, the sort of trap music that sits in my mind as ‘stadium fare’, Augsburg’s very own DJ CJ (as shouted out by the PA announcer) instead chose to run through the best of 2008. We heard Iyaz, Sean Paul, the Black Eyed Peas, Katy Perry, and all manner of fantastic but odd choices—and this was before the game even started.
Lineup introductions were another highlight. Instead of the experience of muttering the visiting introductions under a cavalcade of boos while the home team is treated to the fanfare of a hype video and flashing lights, they read the starting lineups off in alternating fashion—first, an Auggie, then a Saint—and everyone clapped for everyone. It was lovely, if a little bit reminiscent of my days as a middle school star.
One other particular highlight was the aesthetic of this game. Both teams have great color schemes, and it absolutely showed through. Augsburg’s jerseys, pictured below, featured the Minneapolis skyline and a delightfully retrofuturistic block font. It’s hard to see, but the shorts also had a basketball-net pattern running down the side. St. Scholastica’s usage of navy and gold with sky-blue accents felt a little Marquette-like in a very positive sense as well, but we’ll talk more about them when we head up to Duluth.
The game itself was a tale of dichotomies.
Augsburg was, and is, ninth in the MIAC, while St. Scholastica started at the bottom and stayed at the bottom: 11th.
I can speak for the both of us, I think, when I say that neither of us expected greatness out of this game. Augsburg was hitting more of their shots, but neither team looked tremendously competent—the Saints, especially, as Augsburg rolled to a 21-point lead in the first half before some back-and-forth settled the margin at 12 entering the half.
The second half, though. Golly.
Though the shooting splits were factually very similar, it felt like the heavens themselves opened to guide some of those shots in, and as Augsburg continued to stretch their lead, it was rather enjoyable to watch both teams continue to pour the points on (even if one team was doing most of the pouring). With both teams shooting more than 50% from beyond the arc, it definitely felt like a very unique style of basketball, one that I definitely wouldn’t have minded getting more of.
As the game waned on, and more and more guys took off their warmups to trickle in from both ends of the bench, the audience took more to screaming for those guys to get shots up, losing their minds whenever a player popped in his first bucket—and, to their credit, of the 29 players to appear on the court in this matchup, 25 of them scored at least a point.
Despite the game itself flowing in a rather uninteresting manner outside of said shooting, the atmosphere was still an absolute blast. The crowd was small, but the joy of basketball at this level is that you see things you’d never see at most super-high-level games. We saw students doing their homework (scattered throughout the arena, as there didn’t appear to be a student section), parents and siblings cheering louder than anything, the ability to change our seats three times throughout the game, and most enjoyable of all, the opportunity to hear everything that both benches were saying, including one Saint bench player saying, at normal speaking volume, “Blue, that’s a bad call. Bro, that’s a bad call, my guy.”1
After the game, people just…walked onto the court to shoot around. For a moment, I think Eli and I were both stunned, because that’s frankly insane to conceive. To see them so actively encouraging people to get out there and huck a ball or two for a minute was not only dope as hell, but a personal first. Though I didn’t hit more than a shot or two and my form is… awful, I don’t think I’ve had that much fun post-game in a loooong time.
Eli: Someone get me a shooting coach. Jesus Christ. What on earth am I doing with my legs??
The Takeaway
David: You don’t go to lower-division basketball for skill.
You aren’t attending these games to see the future of NBA basketball, or to see SportsCenter highlight reels. You’re not going to get the Cameron Crazies, insane hype videos, or even quarter-full arenas.
You will have fun, though.
This is college athletics at its most joyful, if not its best. None of these guys have genuine pro aspirations—a couple of the better players seemed as though they maybe could have cut it on a Division II roster—and a Wednesday night game between two bottom-tier MIAC schools is not going to be the grand launchpad for much of anything.
These are the games that remind you of what is good about collegiate athletics, the sort that bring forth memories of your own days playing, the type of game that does not take itself too seriously while still maintaining the deep competition that makes it engaging.
I wasn’t sure what exactly to expect, walking in. I’d been to my fair share of basketball games, but never a lower-division contest, so everything that we saw and did and experienced was new, but it felt familiar in the same way a ratty sweater might feel after a lot of wear. It’s not got the shine or the polish, but it has the heart, and that’s enough.
Eli: Yeah, this was a blast. I mentioned that Si Melby looks like a high school gym, but it also feels like one. I felt like I was at a varsity game on a chilly winter night back in Brandon, South Dakota. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed that feeling.
More than anything, what I got from this is that college athletics at their core are supposed to be fun. The Auggies looked throughout the game like they were having the time of their lives, and despite losing by 38, it seemed like most of the Saints had fun too.
If you want good basketball, in my experience, you might have better luck at the U of M rec center, let alone The Barn. But—and this is coming from someone who stood front row in the student section at The Barn for three years—you just can’t get as close to the game there as you can at Si Melby.
Final Thoughts
Eli: I wasn’t entirely sure what I was getting myself into when we conceptualized this series, but if this is our leadoff hitter, I’m already incredibly glad we’re doing this.
This gym was more or less across the street from most of my undergrad classes and I, probably in the top percentile of college basketball sickos on the planet, had let this hidden gem sit unearthed for years. I could have been enjoying this atmosphere the whole time—with even better teams, as Augsburg made the D3 NCAA Tournament when I was a junior—and I didn’t even realize it.
This series, to me, serves to rectify that, and this trip to Si Melby was an excellent start.
David: There’s a conceptual thought that I need to workshop more here, but attending this game was about as close as I have felt to the concept of home since returning to Minnesota. Of course, I’ve spent time with family, loved ones, and experienced that element of it, but there’s something innately familiar about a place like this, somewhere where you, too, can get out of the cold, shake the chill from your bones, and get away for a little while.
I’d missed this sort of casual enjoyment for sports. So often, there’s so much at stake—every loss is a step back from an NCAA Tournament bid, or a move away from the playoffs. Everything is a constant race to be the best, to hit new highs, to come first or not bother coming at all. To experience a game like this was refreshing, a chance to earn a view that we often forget about when wrapped up in our own fandoms.
It’s a chance to learn to love the game again, so close to the way I had originally come to love it.
St. Scholastica 63
AUGSBURG 101
Eli: Another highlight in this regard came at the very beginning of the game. The opening tipoff was batted three times by the same player, which is illegal. The head ref, in a nearly silent gym, explained very loudly and very clearly to a befuddled Augsburg coaching staff why they had to immediately give the ball away after winning the tip.
Coke products spotted. W concessions