Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, longtime men’s basketball team chaplain, holds a piece of net as she celebrates Loyola’s win sending the team to the Final Four back when she was 98.
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Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, longtime men’s basketball team chaplain, holds a piece of net as she celebrates Loyola’s win sending the team to the Final Four back when she was 98.
Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images
Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt became an international celebrity in 2018 when the Loyola Ramblers made it to the NCAA’s Final Four
She had been a teacher for decades and worked at many Catholic schools in California and Chicago before becoming the chaplain for Loyola University Chicago’s men’s basketball team. In that position, she prayed with student athletes, encouraged them, gave advice about the team’s performance and even gave scouting reports about other teams. She was also front and center when the Ramblers played the University of Michigan in the Final Four tournament. Dressed in the school’s maroon and gold regalia, the then 98-year-old cheered from her wheelchair.
Sister Jean was born Delores Bertha Schmidt in 1919 and grew up in a devout Catholic family in San Francisco. In her memoir, Wake Up With Purpose! What I’ve Learned in My First Hundred Years, Sister Jean talks about maintaining a youthful spirit and how she played intramural basketball just as the sport was becoming popular for women and girls.
She also recounted on how she knew early on, when she was just 10 years old, that she wanted to become a religious sister. “I would pray in the morning and I would ask God. I would say please help me know what you want me to do but tell me you want me to be a BVM sister, ” she said.
When she graduated from high school, Sister Jean did join the BVM sisters, the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. As a member of that order she spent many years teaching at Mundelein College for Women. The nuns founded the school, on the north side of Chicago, in the 1930s and in 1991 it became part of Loyola University Chicago. A few years later, Loyola’s president offered Sister Jean a job helping student athletes maintain their grades for eligibility. That position ended up evolving into her chaplaincy of the men’s basketball team. That’s when she would tell players about the importance of a good sense of humor and hard work.
Tom Welch joined Loyola’s Ramblers in 2019 and says what he admired most about Sister Jean was her willpower. “Sometimes as a student athlete, you struggle with motivation to get out of bed, to get to class and practice- kind of give it your all in everything you do in a day. And (my thought was) if she can do it, there’s no reason I can’t,” he said. Welch says it was also impressive to watch Sister Jean, the basketball connoisseur, constantly coming up with game plans and scouting teams they were playing.
It was no surprise in 2018 that while the Ramblers received national attention for the school’s historic March Madness Final Four run–so did Sister Jean. As noted by the school, “she became one of the most talked about topics of the tournament and Sister Jean merchandise including t-shirts and bobblehead figures made in her likeness sold swiftly.” She was the subject of countless media interviews and also held a few of her own press conferences before games.
Even so, in her memoir Sister Jean talks about setting aside daily quiet time and maintaining a forgiving spirit. Still basketball was never far from her mind. Bill Burns, a former Loyola athletic director was particularly struck by the way Sister Jean faithfully watched games from home and kept in touch with Ramblers during the Covid pandemic – calling them and sending them emails.
“For someone that’s 80 years older than those guys, to still be able to maintain that relationship with them and to have to adjust on the fly and do it in some ways technologically was pretty impressive,” he says.
Sister Jean remained a celebrity and a Chicago icon because of her dedication to education, her comradery with students and her love of college basketball but the relationship she had with God early on in life was always her first priority. In her late 90s, she told NPR that she had a simple wish. “When I die, I want to go to heaven and I want my friends to be there too.”
In 2017, Sister Jean was inducted into the Loyola Ramblers Athletic Hall of Fame
At her 103rd birthday celebration, the school took steps to make sure Sister Jean would be remembered. It renamed the plaza outside the train stop near campus in her honor. An inscription reads that it is the “home of the world famous Sister Jean. She died Thursday at the age of 106. She had retired two months earlier.
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