Two with St. Rita ties lauded at Notre Dame Spirit of Sports ceremony
Jay Standring will never forget an encounter he had with Darius Fleming.
Standring was Fleming’s freshman football coach at St. Rita in 2004, and after the season, he watched Fleming try out for the basketball team.
Standring came away impressed. “He was shooting 3’s and dunking,” Standring said. “He was great.”
But Fleming left the tryout and walked into the hallway.
Standring came away puzzled. Standring asked Fleming why he wasn’t in the gym and Fleming told him he wanted to try out for the bowling team.
“Bowling was one of my first loves,” Fleming said. “I went to Rita because it had such a prestigious football team. But I grew up bowling so that’s what I thought I would end up doing.”
Standring may not have been able to coax Fleming back in the gym for basketball that day, but he and the coaches at the school were able to convince him that football was in his future.
The two were reunited and shared some laughs and memories recently at the Knute Rockne Spirit of Sports Celebration at the Chicago Sports Museum in Water Tower Place.
Standring, who graduated from Notre Dame in 1970, was given the Leadership
Award while Fleming graduated from the South Bend school in 2012 and was presented with the Champion Award.
Fleming stayed true to bowling in high school and won a Tony Lawless Award for being the best bowler in the Catholic League in 2008.
But he listened to the coaches and refined his football skills. After a huge Notre Dame career (a four-year starter, 157 tackles, 14 sacks, two interceptions and nine pass deflections), he played linebacker and special teams in the NFL and was on the New England Patriots when they won the Super Bowl in 2015. He recovered a muffed punt in the AFC Championship leading up to the big game.
Fleming was also hailed as a hero in 2016 off the field for playing with 22 stitches in his right leg during a divisional round win over Kansas City after he rescued a woman involved in a car accident two days prior.
He lives in Chicago and is the head of the sports partnership division of Cameo.com, a Chicago video sharing website.
Fleming and Standring compared championship rings at the ceremony, with Fleming’s big and bright Super Bowl ring and Standring’s 1966 Notre Dame national championship ring.
“Coach Standring exemplifies everything we were at Rita — the energy, the passion,” Fleming said. “It was contagious. I felt proud to play for the school. It was an honor
and privilege being with all these guys and they were very impactful in my career.”
Standring said when Fleming was a freshman, he was just another player and didn’t get into games the first three weeks. But after three weeks of huge improvements in practice, Fleming’s football skills took off “to the atmosphere,” Standring said.
This is the second big honor this year for Standring, a Leo graduate who taught and coached at Leo and Mount Carmel before spending more than 40 years at St. Rita.
The 73-year-old had the freshman baseball field at St. Rita named after him during the spring.
He still coaches football and baseball at the school plus does other part-time work, and doesn’t plan on leaving soon.
“I’ll do it forever,” he said. “I get up and swim in the morning at 6 and then take care of the cafeteria and then sub if they want me to. I take care of intramurals at lunch time. I go home and my wife has a lunch for me, and I take a nap and come back and coach. What could be a better deal?”
Other honorees at the Rockne Awards included former Wisconsin football coach and athletic director Barry Alvarez and former Bears kicker and former Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice Bob Thomas.
St. Rita football coach and athletic director Todd Kuska was at the ceremony and beamed about the two members of the Mustang family.
“It’s a great honor to have one person win a Rockne Award but two from the same school?” he said. “I couldn’t be any prouder of the both of them.”