If you’ve watched the NCAA men’s basketball tournament in the last decade you have perhaps encountered Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, a member of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a religious order of Roman Catholic women, and chaplain of the Loyola University Chicago men’s basketball team. Sister Jean was a fixture on television for a month in 2018, when the Loyola Ramblers went on a Cinderella run to the Final Four.
As of this moment she is still with us, at the age of 104. A passionate, faith-filled, determined, and hopeful woman comes through clearly in these reflections — someone that any person, regardless of religious tradition or none, might learn from.
She talks of the power of supernatural belief in her life and of learning this from her parents, who were devout Roman Catholics. She extols the importance of persistent work, also learned from her parents, especially her father, who never finished high school.
Sister Jean’s memoir is full of stories of a life well-lived. Her optimism will inspire many. And each chapter includes the motivational sentences she’s become famous for. The chapter about her becoming the basketball coach at a Catholic middle school for girls in southern California, for instance, includes “Fear is a lousy motivator.” A chapter later, as she tells the story of her becoming principal of another school, we encounter, “When you love what you do, it never really feels like work.”
“Worship. Work. Win.” That is the motto she has used again and again at Loyola University Chicago with the men on the basketball team and in motivational talks. She doesn’t claim that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between worshiping and winning; she simply says that they are both good, worthwhile, and good for you.
