Final Four gives Villanova a secular spin

Villanova University, the venerable Catholic institution in the leafy suburb of Radnor, would like a little forgiveness this week.

A secular fervor has overtaken the campus over its Final Four basketball team, evoking memories of the storied 1985 national champions and giddiness among undergraduates born well after that victory had sparked raucousness and changed lives.

Even professors were taking advantage of the fever to connect with their students, 700 of whom have tickets to the Detroit games thanks to campus lottery luck.

"I opened up my lecture today by asking who had actually acquired Final Four tickets," management professor Peggy Chaudhry confessed. "A bunch of hands went up."

Perhaps this is excess, but try to forgive. The team itself is striving to get over it.

"We're celebrities right now," said guard Corey Stokes, chuckling at the tidal wave of text messages and autograph requests - from his fellow students - that the week had brought. "It's fun right now, but we've got to get the job done on Saturday."

That basketball devotion should reach a fever pitch at the rarefied tier of the Final Four is not wholly surprising. A renewal of roundball faith happens every spring, faculty members said, and with such pervasiveness that study-abroad enrollment has been known to tumble as hoops success rises.

Then there's this: Villanova is a school founded on belief, so how much of a surprise could it be that a campus built around devotion taps into its reserves of passion so readily?

"It's been a whirlwind," the Rev. Peter Donohue, Villanova's president, said in a short, quiet moment yesterday in his office.

He presides over a campus so awash in symbols of its Augustinian Catholic faith that a visitor has a hard time finding a spot where a cross can't be seen (including classrooms), and so committed to that image that the first place prospective students are taken is the St. Thomas of Villanova Church. Even the coffee stands are named Holy Grounds.

And like religion, the Final Four has come up everywhere. Sometimes simultaneously.

"We're not above praying for basketball here," said the Rev. David Cregan, who teaches theater and English. "I'm not, anyway."

Neither is the school's president, who admits to asking a holy favor shortly before Scottie Reynolds' game-winning shot dropped Saturday night.

"I was praying we weren't going to go into overtime," Donohue said.

He was asked what advantage comes to a religion-based university from a sports win.

"It would put us better off in terms of recruitment," Donohue said. "Our main student base comes from the Philadelphia area and the Northeastern region. This would help us create more geographical diversity."

The calculation: If the 1985 championship launched Villanova's name to a national audience and boosted applications, then a second win could cement that prominence.

In evidence for this supposition: Tina Simmons Waters' 1989 diploma.

On April 1, 1985, she was mulling her options for college when she hunkered down to watch the title game with her grandfather. A few months later, she was on campus to start classes.

"What sealed the deal for me going to Villanova was the win," said Waters, now a vice president at Comcast. "Being a Philly girl, we just never won anything."

Waters and other freshmen from the fall of 1985 class arrived to find the campus transfixed by hoops. Coach Rollie Massimino had become a "rock star," as Waters described him, enlisted to preach the virtues of teamwork whenever a cause needed a celeb.

In short, Villanova basketball transformed that year from a pastime to a bankable asset, a new kind of cachet for an institution of stone buildings and ancient faith.

Cregan, also a freshman in 1985, called Villanova's blend of Augustinian Catholicism and basketball fervor more natural than it might seem.

"The center of Augustine's teaching is living in community as a way of exercising personal spiritual growth and spiritual devotion as a group," Cregan said. "One of the things I love in the basketball games is just the spirit and the congeniality of the environment."

Cregan also sees a strong bent toward communal devotion on campus in each week's three student-aimed Sunday evening liturgical services in St. Thomas of Villanova. The Gothic Revival church seats hundreds beneath its landmark twin spires on Lancaster Avenue.

"Most of the time, these liturgies are standing-room only," Cregan said.

Catholicism isn't a requirement for Villanova students, as students and alumni alike are quick to point out.

"You are not pressured in any way to become Catholic," tour guide Chelsea Woods, a sophomore, reassured prospective students twice on a trek across campus Monday.

Her tour mentioned the Wildcats' looming Final Four only once.

The group, it turned out, didn't need to be reminded about the basketball team.

"Oh, we were rooting for them," said Marin Scordato, a law professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington, on the tour with two of his 16-year-old triplets. "We figured there would be a better atmosphere when we were here."