It's much more than just a hoop and a prayer for Notre Dame and Villanova team chaplains in Rome

ROME (AP) — One wall in the Notre Dame office of the Rev. Pete McCormick features a crucifix and religious icons.

Another wall features basketballs signed by Larry Bird and other NBA greats, plus a framed miniature version of the Fighting Irish hardwood floor.

McCormick may be best known for his call to postgame mass after the third quarters of Notre Dame football games. Basketball is his real love, though, and as team chaplain he’s going to have a special role in the college hoops season-opener against Villanova — which has its own team chaplain, the Rev. Rob Hagan — in Rome on Sunday.

In a video call from campus before flying to Italy, McCormick said that he gets to “kind of merge together two deep passions.”

“I love basketball. I mean, you can see in the back of my office, I got the court, I’ve got balls (also signed by Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon),” added McCormick, who likes to roll up the sleeves of his clerical shirt and shoot some hoops any chance he gets. “In some ways you might be led to believe that I’m working in the athletic department when I’m really the (assistant vice president) of campus ministry.”

The doubleheader featuring men’s and women’s games between the two Catholic universities will be preceded by a private audience with Pope Leo XIV on Saturday.

“It’s important to recognize what is it that the church is saying about this: That there is value in the way that sports bring people together and unify them,” McCormick said. “It’s a reminder of the unity to which we’re called. And man, what an important message for us all to hear right now.”

McCormick and Hagan are doing far more than just holding pregame prayers for the teams in Rome. There are customs to follow inside Vatican City and history lessons everywhere you look in Rome.

“If all they do is win a game and miss everything else, then so much will have been missed,” McCormick said. “So my job is going to be hang with them. Try to point out things that maybe otherwise they might not have seen and just live a little life with them.”

McCormick and Hagan have both cut down nets after titles: McCormick when Notre Dame won the ACC tournament in 2015; Hagan after Villanova’s NCAA championships in 2016 and 2018.

Most of their work comes off the court, though.

“There’s no real textbook on chaplaincy,” said Hagan, who was a criminal defense lawyer before he became a priest. “These student athletes have a lot of people talking at them: their coaches, their parents, their agents, their advisers. And so I learned early on that my role was in large part to listen, to be not another person who is kind of just telling them what they should be doing, but giving them an opportunity to open up what might be going on in their head and their heart.

“A lot of these kids were stars in high school. And then they get to the next level and you’re not playing and you’re not performing to the level that you’re used to. There’s competition for your spot. And injury. They have setbacks, physical, mental and spiritual. And so I found an opportunity to just kind of companion them on the journey.”

Hagan is also the Prior Provincial of the Augustinian Province of St. Thomas of Villanova.

Hagan likes to hold mass in the team hotel four hours before game time on road trips.

That usually means at mealtime.

“So you can smell the chicken and the beef and the foods all there in the room and we’ll say, ‘Before we take our food let’s take some spiritual food.’ And we’ll break out the good word and we’ll find a Gospel passage,” Hagan said.

McCormick organizes prayers in the locker room after practice the night before home games.

“That’s a lot of pressure,” he said. “A lot of guys (are) really hungry and I’m trying to focus a minute on the mass.”

Not all of the players at Villanova and Notre Dame are Catholic.

Hagan said Villanova has had “a fair amount” of players who are Protestant and Methodist and there also have been Jews and Muslims.

“That’s the beauty of it: Understanding that nobody has a monopoly on these values,” Hagan said. “Ultimately our call is to go serve others. So that’s kind of a mission that a lot of people can get on board with regardless of their faith persuasion.”

It’s the same at Notre Dame.

“I always say this at the very beginning of the season: ‘It is not my job to make you Catholic,'" McCormick said. "It’s my job to honor and to respect the person that you are, the dignity that you possess, the tradition that you come from. But I do want to accompany you. And I do hope that on some level, by the time it’s all said and done, you have a deeper understanding of God’s love for you.

"And if that helps you to express more fully your own faith tradition, awesome, great. If you say, ‘Hey, I want go and learn more about Catholicism,’ we can do that as well,” McCormick added. “It’s really important for us to attend to the spiritual reality and I think it bonds teams together in the same way that the physical and the emotional (ties) do.”

Religion is a core element at these schools and that’s no different in the athletics departments.

“All of our coaches, they buy in, so it’s not, ‘Well, just say a Hail Mary and get out of the way, Father.’ It’s part of the culture that when we recruit, they know that,” Hagan said. “We’re not trying to hit them over the head with the bible. We’re not try to convert them all. But spirituality is part of the culture.

“We want to develop your mind in an academic institution, we want develop your body, we want you to be physically strong. Why would we leave that other tool out of the toolbox? And so we go for all three: Mind, body and spirit,” Hagan added. “It can only help you as a person beyond just a player.”

The Eternal City Tip-Off, as Sunday’s event has been labeled, coincides with All Saints’ Day.

“The communion of saints is kind of like our Catholic Hall of Fame,” Hagan said. “We hold up people like Augustine and St. Francis, and St. Rita as people who are worthy of imitation. ... What better place than to be in proximity of the tomb of St. Peter, our first pope.”

After the pregame mass for every home game, McCormick hands out saint-themed medals to players.

“You’re going to end up with 15, 16 of these,” he said. “I try to tie some aspect of what that saint stood for into kind of where we’re at in the season or where I know people are at in life.

“I always say find some spot in your locker and just put these there. It’s a reminder that in the midst of everything you got going on, you got these people in your corner, too ... because the season’s always going to throw some curveballs at you," McCormick said. "This is the thing that I love about what Father Rob’s doing, what I’m doing, is that we’re speaking profoundly to a spiritual side that oftentimes doesn’t get the attention it deserves.”

So how do chaplains decide what to read to their teams?

Hagan lets the church calendar dictate the readings.

“I always marvel at how March Madness always falls in the season of Lent. And how seamless the Lenten values translate to a march through the NCAA tournament in terms of sacrifice: Giving up parts of yourself for a greater good,” Hagan said.

The Gospel passage for All Saints' Day is the Sermon on the Mount.

“Jesus called all those people to the foot of the mountain. And he basically said, ‘If you don’t remember anything I said, remember this.’ It’s the greatest sermon ever preached,” Hagan said. “And then he tells them and us what it means to have a blessed, purpose-filled life.”

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