Loyola savoring sweet NCAAs after grass-roots rebuild
DALLAS - Porter Moser wants his Loyola players to savor every moment of the NCAA Tournament. It took the Ramblers a long time - and last-moment shots in consecutive games - to go from what he termed a "grass-roots rebuild" to the Sweet Sixteen.
"It's amazing when you have a group of people who believe," Moser said. "I mean, just this group is resilient. They believe."
Maybe on this Sunday, when they returned home to Chicago from Dallas, they took the chance to catch their breath a bit - and say a prayer or two of thanks.
"We knew we were having to win and win the conference and then get to the conference tournament, and it's been this mentality of you win, enjoy the moment," Moser said. "I'm letting them enjoy it because it's a mature, close group. And I want them to enjoy it. Then the next day, we all say put it in the bank, next one up."
In 100 years of basketball at Loyola, a Catholic college in the heart of Chicago with about 16,000 students, no team has won more games than this year's Ramblers (30-5), the No. 11 seed in the South Region.
"It just means the world to us to bring that pride back to this program," senior guard Ben Richardson said.
They matched the 29 wins of their 1963 national championship team when Donte Ingram's last-moment 3-pointer defeated Miami in their NCAA opener Thursday. They broke that mark two days later, when Clayton Custer's jumper got a friendly bounce off the rim with 3.6 seconds left for a win over Tennessee.
"It just means our season is not over," senior Aundre Jackson said. "We've reached no finish line."
Loyola plays in Atlanta on Thursday night against No. 7 seed Nevada.
The Ramblers will get another pregame prayer from Sister Jean, their 98-year-old team chaplain who also provides her own scouting reports and notes of encouragement to the Ramblers. Jean Dolores Schmidt was in Dallas, and plans to be in Atlanta as well.
Along with their national title, the Ramblers went to the Sweet Sweet in their last NCAA Tournament 33 years ago before Patrick Ewing and Georgetown beat them in the third round.
But when Moser arrived in 2011, and endured a 7-23 debut season with only 1 win in the Horizon League, there was little interest in the program that would move to the Missouri Valley Conference two years later.
Moser, an assistant coach for the late Rick Majerus at St. Louis before that, recalls only a few hundred people at games, and his family walking through the student union with more people there than in the basketball arena.
Still, Moser had a plan, one without shortcuts, to create a winning culture.
"I'm blessed, so blessed that Loyola University, the administrators, the fan base, they were steadfast on how I was saying I was going to do it with good kids, good people. We weren't going to bend on the academic reputation," he said.
"All our kids graduate. We've got high-character kids, and it was a credit to them. And in this day and age, because I know fan bases all over want it so fast."
Time after time when speaking to groups and fans, the coach who is from Naperville repeatedly asked people to imagine Loyola getting back to the NCAA Tournament - and advancing.
"I just kept on pounding that vision," Moser said. "It isn't just me. It is an absolute wide stretch of people at Loyola that has had that vision to do it the right way with a good foundation of great kids, great student-athletes."
Everybody can surely see that now.