Land of 51 Schools, #2: St. Thomas
At the crossroads of D1 talent and D3 charm
Eli: Hello and welcome back to our quest to see a sporting event at every college and university in the state of Minnesota.
Second on our journey is the University of St. Thomas. Tucked away in the heart of suburban St. Paul, this private Catholic school recently became Minnesota’s second Division I institution.
In case you’re unfamiliar, St. Thomas was kicked out of their Division III conference, the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (MIAC), for—no joke—being too good. So the Summit League invited them and they got an NCAA waiver to skip Division II and jump straight to D1. The main catch is that their transition period—the period in which they are ineligible to participate in NCAA-sanctioned postseason events—is five years instead of the usual four. This is their third year in D1, so they’ll be eligible for the NCAA Tournament and other championships beginning in 2026-27.
When we birthed the idea for this series, we’d already seen a men’s basketball game at St. Thomas and quite enjoyed it, so we figured we’d catch another one for review purposes. We actually ended up seeing four games, as we made the trek to St. Paul every time a Dakota school came to town. The North Dakota game is the one we’ll be discussing in this piece, but I’ll intersperse pictures and experiences from other contests where I feel it’s necessary.
Enough beating around the bush.
The Matchup
ST. THOMAS Tommies (14-7, 4-2 Summit) vs. NORTH DAKOTA Fighting Hawks (11-10, 3-3 Summit)
Sport: Men’s basketball
Date: Saturday, January 27, 2024 — 19:00
Venue: Schoenecker Arena | St. Paul (capacity 1,800)
Attendance: 1,540 (85.6%)
The Campus
David: Nestled into Saint Paul’s Highland Park neighborhood, St. Thomas sits at important crossways—along Cretin and Summit Avenues, just north of Grand Avenue, it’s surrounded by local residential developments that give it a very homey charm, while simultaneously offering some pretty lovely views of a more affluent sect of Minnesota’s capital city.
Less than a mile from the river, no more than ten minutes from either downtown, St. Thomas puts a pretty hefty stake in the market for the hearts of Twin Cities residents looking for a Division I school to root for.
With ready accessibility, parking that’s easy enough to manage, and solid infrastructure, there’s not really much to complain about. Pretty brilliant!
The Venue
Eli: Schoenecker Arena is a bit of a liminal space, temporally speaking. It just opened in 2010, but not long after St. Thomas got whisked away to D1, they announced that they’d received a $75 million donation to build a new arena, which is scheduled to open in fall 2025. Not even Atlanta baseball runs through venues this quickly.
While this new arena is expected to push St. Thomas athletics to the next level, the one they already have is still clearly D1 quality. In fact, in comparing Schoenecker to Ausgburg’s Si Melby Hall, it becomes even more obvious why the MIAC booted St. Thomas, as these two venues belonged to the same conference just three years ago.
I mean…a video board? Student sections? Cheerleaders? Actual sound leveling? What is this sorcery!? And you can’t really see it in this picture, but the seats in the center sections on the near side of the court even have seat backs! Unfortunately, they’re literally double the price of almost every other seat in the arena ($30 before fees instead of $15), so we never sat there in our four trips to Schoenecker.
The near side even has a banner LED display, though for whatever reason, the stats on it never seemed to be correct. Midway through the second half, it showed that St. Thomas had only committed one turnover but North Dakota had also earned five steals.
Here’s hoping they fix that up at the new arena.
Directly above the banner LED is another seating area. The tables in the background are used by the broadcast crew and the stairwell in the top-right corner houses a camera, but the seats themselves are ticketed and available for purchase ($25) at every game. Out of curiosity, we sat there for our fourth and final trip to Schoenecker. Here’s the view.
Watching the game from this specific seat (directly at center court) felt kind of like I was watching it on TV. The angle is pretty much identical to the broadcast camera angle, and the announcers’ table was directly behind us, so we could hear them for much of the game.
This is the third level. The second level seems to be inaccessible to everyday fans, but we saw people roaming it every time we were in the building.
Usually it’s a staffer or two just chillin’ with a view, but on this particular night, they invited a couple dozen younger folks who appeared to be recruits.
The slickness of the facility also extended to the entryway. A timeline of St. Thomas athletics graces the back wall and a map of all of the Tommies’ conference opponents is prominently featured between the concession stand and the near side door.
All that said, though, I will admit that this is the part of the venue that looks the most “D3”. It’s not quite the type of concourse you’d expect from most D1 facilities. It’s pretty much just the one concession stand and a pop-up team store right across from each other, with a student fitness center immediately adjacent. If you remove the modern coat of paint, this part of the venue isn’t that much different from Si Melby.
The concessions themselves were at least better than Si Melby’s. I got a slice of pizza and a hot dog to cover my bases and both of them were legitimately tasty. Halfway through eating them, I realized I’d forgotten to snap a picture, so I’ll spare you the shot of my half-eaten frank and mostly eaten pepperoni slice.
But I digress. Between Si Melby and Schoenecker Arena, the latter is easily the superior facility—one that feels well suited to host the mid-major basketball played within its walls. I can only hope that St. Thomas’ new arena will capture the magic of this level of competition as well as Schoenecker does.
The Experience
Eli: The player introductions had a professional sheen that put these production values closer to the G League than to the Division III ranks St. Thomas called home just half a decade ago. After a well edited intro video set to Rihanna’s chorus on “Run This Town” (which, coincidentally, is the same song Minnesota used for their intro video this year), the PA announcer shouts the St. Thomas starting lineup as the classic instrumental for Dr. Dre’s “The Next Episode” blares at full blast.
The crowd goes wild and we’re ready for tipoff.
David: St. Thomas plays a style of basketball that I am (generously) categorizing as silly, and is probably best called “quirked up white boys”—by volume shooting threes and making more than most would, the Tommies have rolled towards the top of the Summit League standings and have solidified themselves as a contender for the league in future years.
It’s also insanely dumb to watch—I’m not sure I’ll ever forget the feeling of watching the Tommies attempt 39 three-pointers in a loss to South Dakota State, my first time watching Division I St. Thomas basketball. It wasn’t good!
As you may surmise, this style leaves one particularly glaring weakness: three-pointers are generally not volume shots for a reason, that being that if you’re not Steph Curry, it’s not likely a value bet to take such a big risk. By betting the entire house with every move, you’re ensuring the payouts are big, but so are the corresponding losses.
On this night, it would prove to be a surging North Dakota team, behind the work of big man B.J. Omot and guard Eli King, that would quiet the Tommies. As St. Thomas languished behind a pitifully quiet night from beyond the arc (4-17, just 23.5%) and quiet nights from Parker Bjorklund and Brooks Allen in the paint, North Dakota took the opportunity to just keep pouring it on. Though neither team shot particularly well, UND’s ability to maintain some semblance of consistency was far more effective than the Tommies’ plan: Raheem Anthony. The guard had a spectacular 32 points, a full half of UST’s total, but it proved to not be enough in the end.
Eli: Even in defeat, St. Thomas ends the festivities with their fight song, “Roll Toms”, which students just wrote in 2021. This is clearly a play on Alabama’s iconic refrain, but it’s much cooler when St. Thomas does it, as is true of pretty much every part of the athletics experience. St. Thomas makes this look good.
The Takeaway
Eli: Can I step on my soapbox for a minute?
Minnesota head coach Ben Johnson is on the record saying he will never schedule St. Thomas. In a radio show on January 4, 2022, during Johnson’s first season at the helm, he said, “I don’t think we are ever going to play St. Thomas. It’s no disrespect, it’s just…we’ll leave it at that. [...] I think [St. Thomas head coach Johnny Tauer] does a great job and wish him nothing but success, but right now we are probably going to stay away from that game.”
I am an alumnus of the University of Minnesota. I cannot properly express in words how much I hate this.
Local rivalries have been the lifeblood of collegiate athletics since Day 1. Minnesota has long suffered from a lack of suitable local rivals given that, in every sport except hockey, we have been the only Division I school in the state for ages. We’ve had to drive four hours to visit our “local” rivals in Madison and Iowa City. Now we have another team right across the river and we won’t even entertain the thought of playing them? Why?
Do we think we’re too good for them? Surely not. In the same radio show, Johnson basically said he wasn’t scared of anyone, claiming that he wanted to focus his efforts on scheduling better opponents and playing in more prestigious non-conference tournaments. This was two months after his team won the inaugural Asheville Championship by defeating Western Kentucky and Princeton, neither of which was a top-100 team in the country.
Last season, Johnson accepted an invite to the SoCal Challenge, in which they needed overtime to defeat California Baptist (#155 on KenPom) and then lost to UNLV (#95). Minnesota (#216) also finished below St. Thomas (#202) on KenPom last year.
This season, Minnesota didn’t even play in a multi-team event and the team’s non-conference strength of schedule was literally 362nd out of 362 teams in Division I (per KenPom). Nobody expected Minnesota to compete for anything this year, but it’s still pathetic that we have to resort to scheduling the likes of IUPUI, New Orleans, Bethune-Cookman, and Arkansas–Pine Bluff to bank up non-conference wins while still refusing to give St. Thomas the time of day.
Is it a territorial thing? Are we trying to stake our claim to the entirety of Minnesota and its wealth of recruits? It can’t be, right? Minnesota has famously almost never succeeded at recruiting the best players in our own backyard. It’s been a running joke that Wisconsin usually has more Minnesota talent than the Golden Gophers, and blue chips have been leaving for the Gonzagas and Dukes of the world for a while.
Even ignoring that, this state is such a basketball hotbed that you could easily fill the rosters of both Minnesota and St. Thomas with D1 talent and still have a ton of players left over. Do we really think nobody is going to want to play for the maroon and gold if they lose to a local opponent? We still play in the Big Ten. The day the entire high school basketball talent pool chooses the Summit League over us will be the day hell freezes over.
But therein lies our answer: Minnesota is a power conference team, so we get to claim victory by default without having to defend it. Why would we allow good mid-major teams to take their shots at us on a level playing field if we could simply not do that and hog all of the glory for ourselves? It’s the very same logic that’s slowly ripping the fabric of college sports apart at the seams. We have the more lucrative media rights, so we get to do whatever ridiculous, anticompetitive things we want under the guise of following the money. We’re the mediocre white man who bashes diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts because we’re scared of losing our job to someone more deserving. We are cowards.
If we weren’t cowards, we would schedule St. Thomas every year. The school has an incredible basketball culture and it would be mutually beneficial if Minnesota could contribute to it and vice versa. Imagine the buzz if the Golden Gophers took the floor at Schoenecker Arena. That’s what college athletics is all about. At least, it’s supposed to be.
Final Thoughts
Eli: Schoenecker Arena is a delight, and I'm sure the new one will be too. I had a great time at all four games we attended.
What always stood out to me was how confident St. Thomas is in their athletic presentation. The Division I Tommies are a middling team in a middling conference, and they're not even eligible for the NCAA Tournament for three more years, but they still give off the swagger of a perennial contender. It's intoxicating to experience in the arena.
St. Thomas and their fans know they can succeed at any level. I'm rooting for them to be right.
David: The Tommies haven’t yet lost that mojo that clearly comes from spending most of my lifetime at the top of the MIAC. Suppose it’s easier when you make jumping two divisions look this easy—though they’re not worldbeaters, it wouldn’t shock me to see them get there.
The world needs more good Minnesotan sport representation at every level. These guys work for me.
NORTH DAKOTA 74
St. Thomas 64
Their purple looks really good! Unfortunately Pepsi at concessions means I can never be a real fan :( But hopefully we'll get Minnesota-Saint Thomas someday.