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By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist
DALLAS — They have beaten double and triple teams, fought off screens and out-foxed box-and-one defenses.
But among the basketball players at 22nd-ranked Xavier, it is common knowledge that nobody eludes Sister Rose Ann Fleming, a wily 69-year-old nun.
And, only the foolhardy even bother to try.
She is the Musketeers' academic advisor and her tenacity is as much legend on the Cincinnati campus as the team's perfect graduation rate and better known than the 25-5 record the Musketeers take into Friday's NCAA Tournament game with Hawai'i.
Cincinnati Enquirer photo
Since she moved over from the English department in 1985, all 43 Xavier basketball players who have finished their careers with the Musketeers have graduated. It is a remarkable accomplishment in today's intercollegiate athletic world where the NCAA says less than 47 percent of male basketball players, on average, make it to graduation within six years.
Xavier academic advisor Sister Rose Ann Fleming, left, won't let any of the basketball players settle for anything less than a solid Jesuit education. The 69-year-old nun moved over from the English department and became academic adviser in 1985.
(UH coach Riley Wallace says five of his six seniors over the last two years will graduate.)
Players at Xavier who have been inclined to settle for less or come determined to avoid the library have awakened to find Sister Rose, the epitome of the ruler-waving, knuckle-rapping nun, banging on their dormitory or apartment doors for a sunrise tutorial. This after she concludes her daily 3-mile run.
She adopted that tactic after players who had been tardy turning in papers got wise to her phone calls. Derek Strong, who would later go on to an NBA career, once tried to wait her out, figuring after 65 rings, she had given up. She hadn't. Sister Rose phoned right back for 65 rings before Strong gave in, according to a long-time staff member.
"I'll do anything — well, almost anything legitimate — it takes to get their attention,"she said.
If it means leading someone who towers over her by a foot and a half to the library by hand and applying one-on-one pressure to see them through an assignment, she'll do it. And has.
If it means holding a player out of a game, or several, she'll also do that and has, having been given the power to bench any player.
"She's a very remarkable, persistent person and the players, when they come here, learn real soon that she's serious," said Tom Eiser, an Xavier spokesman. "Not too many want to try and fool with her."
"I was determined when I took the job to see that when players left here none of them felt like they had been used for their abilities and abandoned when their eligibility was over," Sister Rose said. "Too many kids seem to major in just keeping their eligibility. I wanted to make sure that when they left here they'd made the most of a good Jesuit education and wouldn't have any regrets later on."
When she first took the job, the fear was that this nun from the academic world — she has two master's degrees, a Ph.D and law degree — would be the one getting the "education" from the many street-smart, urban players the school recruits.
Two team "MVP" plaques on her office wall, the only two ever awarded under former coaches Pete Gillen and Skip Prosser, a place in Xavier's Hall of Fame and an invitation to sit with her players in the Green Room at the NBA draft, suggest she has more than held her own.
