On Oct. 22, the College of Saint Benedict will celebrate 50 years of Title IX by honoring 50 of our greatest and most influential student-athletes in a ceremony at 7 p.m. in the Benedicta Arts Center (BAC) on campus. The event is free and open to the public. Please join us!
Leading up to the event, we will spotlight just a few of the major events that helped form the foundation of the long and successful Bennie athletic tradition we know today.
SAINT JOSEPH, Minn. -- It wasn't something Laura Wendorff Meyer and her teammates talked a whole lot about. But entering the 1998-99 college basketball season, they knew they had something special.
The core group of that College of Saint Benedict squad had been playing together for a while and finished 25-2 the season prior, advancing to the second round of the NCAA Division III tournament for the second consecutive year.
Some preseason publications even had Saint Ben's ranked No. 1 in the nation. Not that Wendorff and company were paying much attention.
"At the time, we didn't have the kind of internet access we do now," she recalls. "So we weren't even looking at a lot of that stuff. But clearly, we could sense we had something pretty good going.
"Especially when we got off to a great start and kept rolling."
Indeed, the Blazers (the school's then-nickname) cruised through the regular season with only one loss, wrapped up another MIAC title and again advanced to the NCAA tournament, defeating archrival St. Thomas 76-68 in the first round.
"I think we were motivated by how close we felt we came the previous year," said
Mike Durbin, who has been the head basketball coach at CSB since 1986 and boasts a career collegiate coaching record of 716-264 (712-242 at CSB). "We felt like we were capable of going a lot further than we did."
The win over the Tommies put the Blazers in the Sweet 16 and, better still, CSB was chosen as a host school. Claire Lynch Hall was packed to watch Saint Ben's
beat DePauw (Indiana) 78-67, then down Pacific Lutheran (Washington) 61-55 the following night to earn a sport in the Final Four for just the second time in program history.
The crowds were so huge that many were turned away at the gate and had to settle for watching the action on video monitors in the lobby of the Haehn Campus Center.
"That was amazing," Wendorff said. "It was standing-room only in there. The excitement level was off the charts. Even on campus in the week leading up to those games, you'd walk around and everybody knew what was happening. It was really cool."
The Final Four that year was held at Western Connecticut State University. CSB took on Salem (Massachusetts) State in the national semifinals, winning 74-54 and led by 14 points from junior Molly Mark, a St. Cloud Apollo graduate, to advance to the first national championship game in school history.
There, the Blazers fell 74-65 to top-ranked Washington (Missouri) University. Mark and senior Robyn Ruschmeier led CSB with 14 points each. But the loss did nothing to diminish how much that team achieved.
"There are things I will always remember from that time," Durbin said. "The reception with our fans when we got back to our hotel after the championship game. The reception we got in the atrium of the HCC when we returned to campus. The parade the city threw for us in St. Joe. That team played like rock stars and, in our small community, they got treated like rock stars as well."
Wendorff was named an All-American and MIAC player of the year, joined on the all-conference first team by Mark and Ruschmeier. Mark made the All-MIAC defensive team, an honor fellow starter Jenny Blaser had earned the year before – the same season that Beth Holbrook earned MIAC sixth-player of the year, a role she filled again in '98-99.
"And Julie Korf (a Pierz graduate, and the fifth starter on that team) was really underrated as well," Durbin said. "She didn't score a lot, though she could if you left her open. But she had an amazing talent for passing the ball. That whole team was made up of exceptionally talented high school players who came together at the college level with an amazing amount of unselfishness."
The results showed on the court.
"At the time, it seemed like a big deal to get as far as we did," Wendorff said. "But now, in hindsight, it's really amazing to think about. Not many teams get the chance to play for a national title. It was a really unique experience and I'm just so grateful I was able to be part of it."
