The St. Thomas Tommies pulled off the most audacious jump in college sports history. In 2021, the school moved directly from Division III to Division I — skipping Division II entirely, a transition the NCAA had to grant special permission for. The Tommies went from playing in front of a few hundred people in the MIAC to battling in the Summit League overnight, and the gamble has worked beyond anyone's expectations.
The pedigree was real. Under head coach Johnny Tauer — now in his 16th season, a tenured professor of psychology who built a small-college dynasty — St. Thomas was a Division III power: MIAC champions year after year, a national runner-up finish, and the 2016 national championship. The school bet that the winning culture would translate. Five years into the experiment, the Tommies are coming off back-to-back 24-win seasons.
The arc has been a steady climb: 10-20 in the debut season, then 19-14, then 20-13, then 24-10 with a first-ever trip to the Summit League championship game in 2025, falling to Omaha. Last season — 2025-26 — was the breakthrough the whole project was building toward. St. Thomas went 24-10 again, finished second in the Summit at 12-4, and played its first season of full NCAA Division I eligibility after the NCAA let the school exit its transition a year early in January 2025. For the first time, the Tommies could actually dream of March.
March, cruelly, will have to wait a little longer. The Tommies reached the Summit League tournament semifinals in Sioux Falls and had the ball in a tie game with North Dakota in the closing seconds — and what happened next will live in program lore. Sophomore guard Austin Herro, with the clock dying, drove the baseline, left his feet with no pass to make, and had his desperation attempt stolen; North Dakota raced the other way, drew a foul with 0.1 on the clock, and sank the free throw for a 67-66 win. A season that deserved a title-game shot ended in the most agonizing fashion imaginable. All five of St. Thomas's Summit League losses that year came by four points or fewer.
The consolation was history: the Tommies earned the program's first Division I postseason bid, a trip to the NIT, where they fell to Seattle in the first round. Not the Big Dance — but a banner-worthy milestone for a program that five years earlier was playing D-III ball.
The engine of the rise has been offense — genuinely historic offense. For the first time in at least two decades, a Summit League team scored 90-plus points in four straight games, and that team was St. Thomas. Sophomore guard Nolan Minessale, the Summit League Preseason Player of the Year, opened the 2025-26 season with eight straight 20-point performances — the first Tommie to do that under Tauer in at least twenty years — and earned a spot on the Lou Henson Award early-season watch list. Austin Herro — yes, the younger brother of Miami Heat star Tyler Herro — set a program single-game record with seven steals at North Dakota. And guard Nick Janowski poured in 31 points against Denver in January, one of just four Division I players all season to reach 30 points on three-pointers alone.
The setting changed too. The 2025-26 season was the Tommies' first in the sparkling new Lee & Penny Anderson Arena, after fifteen years at cozy Schoenecker Arena — whose farewell, a 61-55 win over Kansas City on March 1, 2025, closed a chapter on the small-college era. The new building, shared with the hockey programs, is the physical proof of the school's ambition: this is no longer a D-III program borrowing a bigger stage.
What defines the Tommies right now is the audacity of the jump and the speed of the climb. From D-III to D-I in one leap, a 2016 national title in the rearview, and a roster built on Minnesota's rich hoops talent that plays with D-III grit and D-I ambition. The 2026-27 season brings full eligibility, a veteran core, and a Summit League that knows exactly what St. Thomas is now: not a cute experiment, but the conference's next power — and a program whose first NCAA Tournament berth feels like a matter of when, not if.
The 2026-27 campaign opens with a nod to the program's roots: a November 11 date with old MIAC rival Macalester at Lee & Penny Anderson Arena, the first meeting since January 2020 — before the leap, before the Summit, before everything changed. It's a regular-season game for the Tommies now, an exhibition for the Scots, and a perfect symbol of how far St. Thomas has come: the old neighborhood, in the new building, with a team that belongs on a much bigger stage. From there, the Summit gauntlet — and, for the second straight year, a legitimate shot at the conference's automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament.