Sister Jean Dolores Bertha Schmidt, the beloved Catholic nun who, at age 98, skyrocketed to fame with a maroon and gold scarf fluttering from her neck as chaplain of the Loyola University Chicago men’s basketball team during its Cinderella run to the 2018 NCAA Final Four — has died.
She was 106.
“In many roles at Loyola over the course of more than 60 years, Sister Jean was an invaluable source of wisdom and grace for generations of students, faculty, and staff,” said Mark C. Reed, Loyola president, in a statement late Thursday. “While we feel grief and a sense of loss, there is great joy in her legacy. Her presence was a profound blessing for our entire community and her spirit abides in thousands of lives. In her honor, we can aspire to share with others the love and compassion Sister Jean shared with us.”
She is survived by her sister-in-law, Jeanne Tidwell, and her niece, Jan Schmidt. Visitation and funeral arrangements will be announced soon by Loyola University.
Amid the basketball hysteria, the nation marveled at Sister Jean, Loyola’s secret weapon: the tiny nun who was equally adept at leading team prayers and offering scouting reports.
Images of towering basketball players bending low to give Sister Jean a postgame hug became part of the nightly news.
Asked by a reporter what she had given up for Lent, Sister Jean replied: losing.
Hoopers ranging from NBA All-Star Charles Barkley to former President Barack Obama paid homage.
The NCAA arranged for Sister Jean to have her own press conference ahead of Loyola’s Final Four game in San Antonio.
Reporters gave her a round of applause when it concluded.
A Sister Jean bobblehead became a bestseller.
The world was learning what folks at Loyola had known for years: Sister Jean is awesome.
“I may be an old nun, but I know my hoops,” she wrote in her 2023 memoir “Wake Up with Purpose!: What I’ve Learned in My First Hundred Years.”
At 103, she rose daily at 5 a.m., returned emails and read news on her iPad, said her prayers and was in her office in the student center on Loyola’s Rogers Park campus by 10 a.m.
She greeted students each morning. Many stopped by her office to say hello or have a chat.
“Go for your dreams. You’ll always regret it if you don’t,” she’d tell them.
If she saw a student sitting alone in the cafeteria, she’d be sure to stop by and strike up a conversation.
Former Sun-Times sports reporter Madeline Kenney, once a Loyola cheerleader and one of Sister Jean’s devoted pals, wrote in 2018: ‘‘Sister Jean has a way of making you feel at peace, no matter what adversity you are facing. Her smile is a comforting serum. She makes you feel like her best friend.’’
Former Sun-Times sports columnist Rick Telander noted that simply being around her gave you a boost.
“You look at Sister Jean, you listen to her, you watch her with people, with her players and students and just about anybody who happens to be around, and it’s impossible not to smile. She makes you smile because she is happy.”
Her fame was followed by many, many selfie requests. She joked she was the “Selfie Queen.”
She retired from her duties with the university in August at 106 years old due to health struggles.
Sister Jean used a wheelchair in recent years after breaking a hip and having shingles.
“I like to think that I’ve got just as much if not more energy as people who are many years my junior,” she wrote in her memoir. “I only wish I could jump out of this wheelchair and dance a jig.”
She believed in something her mother used to say: “It’s better to wear out than rust out.”
Sister Jean was born Dolores Bertha Schmidt on Aug. 21, 1919 — just months after the end of World War I.
Joseph and Bertha Schmidt raised her and two younger sons in a devout Catholic home in San Francisco’s Castro District.
It was a diverse neighborhood and her parents preached acceptance of different cultures.
The siblings played touch football with the kids on the block.
Her father worked as a janitor at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium and later worked as a deputy sheriff.
She helped her dad brew beer during Prohibition by throwing in the hops.
She saved her birthday, Christmas and First Communion money to spend on a trip to Chicago for the 1933 World’s Fair.
Her family swam off a boat that had a permanent berth in a tributary of the San Francisco Bay. It had sleeping quarters and served as a family getaway.
They watched the Golden Gate Bridge go up and walked across it with thousands of other revelers when it finally opened in 1937.
Her family had a pet monkey named Jerry — a gift from a family friend who regularly traveled to South America. Jerry wore a red sweater, had coffee and toast for breakfast and was a main attraction for kids in the neighborhood until it was stolen from their backyard.
Sister Jean idolized her third-grade teacher, a beautiful young nun from the religious order of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and aspired to follow her path.
After graduating from high school, she entered the religious order at age 18 and began living and training at the group’s headquarters, known as the Mother House, in Dubuque, Iowa.
She made her vows in 1940 and received her new name, Jean, along with her first assignment: Go to Chicago to teach fifth grade at the parish school next to St. Vincent de Paul Church in Lincoln Park.
She was in Chicago for only a year before she was reassigned to a Catholic school in Los Angeles. She spent the next 20 years at several schools in the area, teaching and working as a principal.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, and with fear of Japanese bombing raids ever present, her students wore dog tags with their names and addresses on them.
After the war, she worked at a school in Hollywood where comedian Bob Hope sent his kids.
As a teacher, she emphasized making learning fun and favored the light touch and teachable moments used by her parents.
“I wanted the kids to think of me as a fun-loving kind of gal, habit and all,” she said in her memoir.
But she was no pushover. She once pinned a rowdy boy to her apron for a whole week. “That straightened him out,” she said in her memoir.
She also once pinned a note from a hopeful boy to a female classmate to her apron for all to see (it contained just a phone number).
Sister Jean valued sports as a character-building activity. She was raised in a sports-loving home, played youth basketball and helped establish sports programs and coached at the schools where she worked.
She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Catholic universities in Los Angeles and in 1961 she was reassigned to teach at Mundelein College, an all-women school that years later became a part of Loyola University Chicago.
Over the years, she’s held titles ranging from assistant professor to acting dean.
But she valued student interaction above all else. It was “like oxygen to me,” she said.
She helped incoming students navigate school life and ran a program that matched students with senior citizens living in a high-rise near the university’s downtown campus to build relationships and offer a helpful hand.
Her association with Loyola’s men’s basketball team began in 1994, when, at 75, she was ready to retire, but was asked to help athletes keep up their grades to maintain eligibility. Her role evolved into a position as official team chaplain.
It became the highlight of her career.
In her memoir she recalled blessing the hands of a player who was in a shooting slump — and he started scoring again. Then other players asked for the same blessing. She blessed the refs, too.
After pregame prayers with the players, she’d get on the microphone at Gentile Arena and offer a prayer for all in attendance.
“Does God really care who wins a basketball game? Maybe he cares more than we think?” she wrote in her memoir.
“If nothing else, I imagine God must laugh sometimes when someone prays to win a game. God sees a lot of horrible stuff going on. Sometimes he needs a good laugh. I’d like to think I give him a chuckle every time I say into that microphone, ‘Amen and Go Ramblers!'”
She had custom maroon Nikes with her name stitched on the heels.
She rooted for all Loyola sports teams and regularly attended a variety of games and sat right next to the action until a spiked volleyball hit her in the face in 2014. It resulted in two black eyes and a fractured wrist.
“They took me to the emergency room and everyone was so worried but I was only mad that I had to miss the rest of the match,” she wrote.
“From that point on I was required to sit at a comfortable distance from the action. I acquiesced, but I didn’t like it one bit.”
Sister Jean enjoyed her fame. She’s thrown out a first pitch at a Cubs game. Former President Joe Biden sent her flowers on her birthday. The plaza outside the Loyola CTA Red Line stop was named in her honor. But she never let it go to her head.
“Why me? I think it starts with the fact that I’m so old. Let’s face it, people love little old ladies. We’re harmless. We’re cheerful. And we’ve been through a few things. People innately want to be happy and safe and stay alive,” she wrote in her memoir.
“But I’d also like to think people were interested in me because, whether they realized it or not, they wanted to be closer to God. They knew I had spent my whole life serving him. We hear so much about the negative aspects of human nature, but my ride through the 2018 NCAA tournament revealed just how much goodness there is in people. I hope we never lose sight of that,” she said.