Sister Jean Schmidt, Loyola chaplain of Final Four fame, dies at 106

Tim Balk and Joseph Wilkinson, New York Daily News on Oct 10, 2025

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CHICAGO — Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, the upbeat hoop-head Loyola University Chicago chaplain who became an adored national figure during the school’s 2018 run to the Final Four, died Thursday in Chicago. She was 106.

Loyola announced her death late Thursday night; a cause was not announced.

An omnipresent fixture at basketball games at the snug North Side Chicago school long before the Ramblers men’s team captured the eyes of the nation, Sister Jean offered an array of life lessons to fans and admirers.

Welcoming each day, she would say hello to each student she ran into.

“I just say good morning to everybody ― I don’t care if they’re texting or if they have their phone in their ear,” she once told Dr. Jo Ann Rooney, the university’s president. “I say: ‘Good morning! Good morning!’ It’s just a fun thing to do.”

As Loyola rattled off upset win after upset win in March 2018, the rest of the sporting world fell in love with the elderly California-born Catholic seated happily by the Ramblers.

She continued her long-running practice of offering Porter Moser, then the team’s coach, scouting reports of opponents. Only now the rest of the nation was in on the squad’s secret weapon.

A crush of reporters and photographers flooded a briefing room at the Alamodome when, at age 98, she took a news conference from her wheelchair during the Final Four.

“Good morning,” the grinning nun greeted the army that had come to see her. Asked if she was ready, she enunciated her glee. “Oh, you better believe it.”

Loyola ultimately lost that weekend to Michigan. The Ramblers had surpassed their greatest fan’s projection. On her bracket, Sister Jean picked the squad to lose in the Sweet 16.

The sister remained a fixture at Gentile Arena, the school’s bandbox gymnasium, after the magical Cinderella campaign. At each contest, she offered her signature pregame prayer to crowds that filled the building.

When the Ramblers returned to the Dance during the pandemic-altered 2020-21 season, Sister Jean, fully vaccinated and 101 years old, headed to the Indiana bubble to take in the action and root on her squad. Loyola again made noise, knocking off a top-seeded Illinois squad, before fizzling out in the Sweet 16.

An early riser, Sister Jean said she tended to an overflowing email box.

And after each men’s basketball game, she sent Moser — who now runs men’s hoops at the University of Oklahoma — an email of her own, offering her thoughts on the battle.

“There is no human like her,” Moser told The Peoria Journal Star newspaper in 2017.

Over her century on earth, the nun lived out an expression favored by her mother.

“My mom used to say,” Sister Jean once told Chicago Magazine, “It’s better to wear out than rust out.”

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