Loyola basketball program clears all hurdles

By Ron Brocato
Clarion Herald

In a true triumph of the will, Loyola University New Orleans has become Louisiana’s only college to win a national collegiate basketball championship.

The Wolf Pack did so by crushing conference mate Talladega, 71-56, in the championship of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) March 22 in Kansas City.

The victory for the little Catholic university that sits in the shadow of Tulane University was hardly a shocker. The Pack beat Talladega four times during the season, twice in Southern States Athletic Association (SSAA) Conference games and twice in the NAIA playoffs. The tournament’s No. 1 seed finished its finest season with a 37-1 record.

The national title comes 77 years after Loyola won its first NAIA title by soundly defeating Pepperdine, 49-36, also in Kansas City. Coached by the legendary Jack Orsley, Loyola also made it to the 1946 national finals. And, as a Division I program, the team also qualified for the NCAA men’s tournament in 1954, 1957 and 1958, playing their home games on its elevated court in the oversized Quonset hut known as Loyola Fieldhouse.

This victory was indeed sweet vindication for a program that has weathered disruptions and controversy.

This season alone, Coach Stacy Hollowell’s team lost its homecourt advantage when Hurricane Ida damaged the University Sports Complex in August. Tulane allowed its neighbor to use its Devlin Fieldhouse, two blocks away, to play its home games.

When the team returned from a brief exile in Dallas, it had to practice at various gymnasiums based on their availability. But that didn’t stop the players’ resolve, and neither did another variant of COVID that brought several activities in Louisiana to a halt.

Loyola’s early-round NAIA playoff games drew upwards of 2,000 spectators to Devlin to see the maroon and gold perform on their road to this glorious conclusion.

The revelation that it has been eight decades between national titles is not the story of that triumph. The school’s athletic program, which included a welterweight boxer named Eddie Flynn winning a gold medal at the 1932 Summer Olympics, came to a shocking end in 1972 when the school dropped all of its intercollegiate sports and left scholarship athletes without a sport in which to compete.

Although the university honored their scholarships, many athletes moved on to other colleges long before there was such a thing as a transfer portal.

The 1972 season still had a handful of games remaining. Wolf Pack fans lined up at the ticket window to display their disapproval of a storied program coming to an end. According to The Times-Picayune, 6,300 spectators were on hand for the next Loyola home game.

One day after the fatal announcement that this would be the final basketball season and there would be no spring sports at all, the basketball players stripped all identification from their uniforms prior to a home game against Centenary, saying they would play the game and the remainder of the season for “personal pride.” They became known as the “Loyola Orphans,” as their white jerseys bore only numbers and the outline of the Wolf Pack stitching.

At the end of the season, Loyola’s two star players, 6-foot-7 forward Ernie Losch and 6-foot-3 guard John Kardzoniak, transferred to Tulane for their senior years.

It took nearly 20 years for Loyola to get back into the business of men’s and women’s athletics. Today, the university offers scholarships in 10 sports, including volleyball, baseball and men’s and women’s basketball, swimming, tennis and track and field.

In 1991, the men’s basketball program was placed under the stewardship of coach Jerry Hernandez. He brought the program back to life and some degree of prominence through 2004, when Mike Giorlando took over and elevated it further.

In 2015, Hollowell became the head coach, and Loyola’s basketball programs – both men’s and women’s – are today in the pantheon of NAIA athletics.

After a long hiatus, the duckling has emerged as a swan and owns the bragging rights as Louisiana’s only national basketball champion. Ever!

Pack defeated four teams to win its first title in 1945

The year was 1945; the date was March 17. The United States was fighting a world war in two hemispheres.

But the big news at home was about Coach Jack Orsley’s band of brothers from Loyola University winning the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics Intercollegiate basketball tournament with a 49-36 victory over Pepperdine in Kansas City.

The game story in The Times-Picayune was just three paragraphs long under a banner headline that crossed the top of the main sports page.

Loyola survived the 16-team tournament by defeating Phillips (Enid, Oklahoma), 53-31; Central Normal (Danville, Indiana), 60-43; and Southern Illinois Normal (Carbondale, Illinois), 37-35, to gain a spot in the finals.

Loyola’s Leroy Chollet, a Holy Cross graduate, was named the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player. James Hultberg also made the all-tournament team.

rbrocato@clarionherald.org