How St. Thomas has grown from D-III to the doorstep of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament

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On Thursday night, the St. Thomas Tommies beat South Dakota State in the Summit League quarterfinals, meaning they’re now just two wins away from making their first ever trip to the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.

The program had an excellent regular season. they finished second in the Summit League standings (just two games behind North Dakota State), and with favorable computer metrics and a 24 total wins, they will certainly have postseason opportunities somewhere, be that in the NIT or another tournament, should they fail to win the Summit League.

That’s a big deal for St. Thomas, as this is the first year they’re actually eligible to participate in the NCAA Tournament, or any official NCAA postseason championship, as their reclassification period to D-I officially ended. But unlike almost every other team that recently joined D-I, the Tommies joined directly from Division III.

Clearly, St. Thomas has invested quite a bit into the athletic department over the last few years. But what exactly needs to happen in order to move from a successful D-III program to a postseason-caliber D-I program?

St. Thomas wasn’t just a D-III athletic department…they were a really good one, and their men’s basketball program was no exception. The Tommie won a D-III national title in 2016, and were a tournament mainstay in the 2010s.

But athletic director Dr. Phil Esten told me that back then, their men’s basketball program was also staffed like a really good D-III program.

“We had only one full-time coach. Everybody else on staff was part time or volunteer.”

And to drive home just exactly how D-III this staff was…that head coach, John Tauer, is also a tenured member of the psychology department at St. Thomas. He has a PhD and everything.

Tauer is still the head coach, but Esten knew that moving to D-I would require significant staffing resources to give his head coach the infrastructure he needed to be successful.

Esten pointed to the variety of assistant coaches and senior administrative hires the department made over the last few years as being critically successful, especially since so many of them had experience working in D-1 athletic departments. Associate head coach Mike Maker, for example, was the head coach at Marist for a decade, and Kenneth Lowe came from Miami (OH).

But it wasn’t just assistant basketball coaches, the department also prioritized adding folks with D-1 experience as associate ADs, sport administrators, and all over the department. Esten pointed to this experience as critical in helping to “upskill” some of the program’s existing coaches.

“There’s a difference between coaching a program and leading a program,” he told me. The D-I experience requires coaches to know how to “lead” a program. That’s more than just knowing how to scheme up a great inbound play.

Before joining the Summit League, Esten told me that the longest road trip St. Thomas would regularly take was “about three hours from campus.” While the Tommie can bus to several of their Summit League opponents, like UMKC or North Dakota State, there was no getting around travel logistics suddenly getting a lot harder.

That meant new investments into operations staffers, travel agencies, contingency planning (driving weather in the Dakotas can suck during the winter, after all), and more. And those charter buses, commercial flights and rent-a-cars aren’t cheap.

The facility requirements at the D-I level are also more expansive and expensive than in D-III. Esten specifically pointed to needing to buy things like pitch clocks for baseball, the technical capacity to support instant replay in multiple sports, and investments in broadcast production across the department, as non-trivial expense increases.

As a private school, St. Thomas is not obligated to share the nitty-gritty financial details of their athletic department with nosy reporters or the general public. But Esten did point out that the school understood it would need to get far better at development strategies to generate more athletic department revenues that could offset some of their new transition expenses.

One new development that’s helping? The brand new Lee & Penny Anderson Arena, which opened last October. The Arena, home of St. Thomas basketball and hockey, doesn’t just give the Tommies a chance to play in what Esten described as “one of the nicest buildings in the country, just not one of the biggest”, but also created a pathway to earn more revenues.

“We’re in a great professional sports market in the Twin Cities”,” Esten said, “but it’s a competitive one. That means that fans have a certain level of expectations about the experience of attending a live event.” The athletic department hired Levy Food Services to handle concessions at the stadium, and Esten noted that St. Thomas being in a big city means that many of their stadium workers “will have also had experience working in professional sporting events.” The building’s management team came from professional sports as well.

A new building also means new luxury seating options, new (and more) sponsorship opportunities, expanded beverage selection, and all the other bells and whistles.

Esten declined to share specifics, but did tell me that “gameday revenues are easily up 4x in the new facility.”

John Tauer is still the head basketball coach. Esten was the AD before the transition to D-I officially happened. While many faces are new, there are plenty of coaches and administrators who were at St. Thomas in 2017 and now.

The new basketball arena helps, the D-I buy game money helps, and having decades of big time college sports experience can help smooth over the rocky parts of any major transition. But above all of that, Esten pointed to the culture of the university, as well as the athletic department, as the single biggest reason why the team has been successful so shortly after moving to D-I.

“We’ve done a great job, as a school, at maintaining a culture of humility and gratitude. And we’ve very, very honest with not just each other, but ourselves. We know who we are at St. Thomas, and we aren’t going to try and be anybody else.”

That’s worked in D-III. And wouldn’t you know it…it seems to be working in D-I as well.

FWIW, I’ll probably write more about how college basketball schedules are actually set up in the near future, because if my Twitter mentions were any indication, there are plenty of fans who don’t understand how this process works. I can assure you, Miami wanting money to play true road games is not the problem.

I’ve got even more original reporting coming next week. You can get two EP newsletters a week for free, but a premium subscription gets you everything we write, and everything we’ve already written (a backlog of over 1,000 newsletters!). Your subscriptions pay for our FOIA fees, our freelancer budget, our salaries, and our ability to do this work.

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you on the internet!