Beilein’s aunt, Sister Frances, was intense fan
The world knows Sister Jean. Now meet Sister Frances.
Sister Jean Dolores-Schmidt is chaplain of the men’s basketball team at Loyola -Chicago. These days she’s an international celebrity as the 98-year-old Cinderella of March Madness — and Saturday her Ramblers will meet Michigan in the Final Four.
Michigan is coached by John Beilein, whose aunt was Sister Frances Niland. She died in 1995 at 73. She’d be 96 now, a contemporary of Sister Jean’s, had she lived. And Sister Frances, by all accounts, was every bit the hoops fan that Sister Jean is — and perhaps an even feistier one.
Joe Niland Jr. is Beilein’s cousin, and he just finished his 19th season as coach at the University of Mobile, an NAIA school in Alabama. His first coaching job came in the late 1970s at Saint Mary of Sorrows, a parish school in Buffalo, where he was hired by the principal — his aunt, Sister Frances.
“Better I should have coached for Sister Jean,” Niland says, laughing. “Working for Sister Tom was like working for George Steinbrenner.”
(The family called her Sister Tom, short for Sister Marie Thomas, her name until the Vatican II era, when nuns no longer had to use their religious names.)
Niland says his teams regularly reached the semifinals of diocesan tournaments but Sister Frances preferred champions. And she was known to yell at referees. Let the record show her language was always clean, if not always charitable.
Frances Niland was Dan Starr’s sixth-grade teacher in 1946 at St. Paul’s in the Buffalo suburb of Kenmore.
He remembers how she’d tell the class about the exploits of her brothers, Joe and Tom Niland, stars of the basketball team at Canisius College.
Joe Sr. would go on to coach Canisius -- and Tom would coach Le Moyne, where Tom would eventually hire Beilein, his nephew, to succeed him.
In 1992, when Starr was athletics director at Canisius, he hired Beilein to his first Division I coaching job. Days later, Starr got a letter from Sister Frances. “Danny, you finally did a right thing,” it said, as Starr recalls it.
Mark Russell, the political satirist, used to say, “After the nuns in Catholic school, Marine boot camp was a piece of cake.” Sister Marie Thomas was his sixth-grade teacher at St. Paul’s in 1943. Russell returned to Buffalo from his comedic base in Washington for a book signing in 1980 and Sister Frances stood in line to get her copy inscribed. He’s never forgotten.
Bridget Niland, Joe Jr.’s sister, is director of youth sports initiatives for the Community Foundation of Greater Buffalo. She’s also the youngest of 42 cousins in Beilein’s generation.
“Sister Tom wasn’t the kind of nun who’d rap your knuckles with a ruler,” Bridget says, “but she set high standards and she expected you to rise to the occasion. I had a healthy fear but also respect and admiration for her. She was tough on us, but in a good way, in an era when you could be tough.”
Sister Frances was inspired to become a nun by her father’s sisters, who were sisters of St. Mary’s of Namur long before Sister Frances joined.
“Yeah, when you add them in,” Niland Jr. says, “I think we’ve got Sister Jean outflanked.”