We noted the other day that we’d do a deeper dig into the athlete rosters at Thomas More and Northern Kentucky Universities these days.
Here goes.
• THOMAS MORE FOCUS IS LOCAL . . . WITH AN INTERNATIONAL TOUCH: TMU lists hometown info for 382 roster athletes right now in early summer although that number will be closer to 600 when all the recruits and new team members are in by the end of the summer, says the school’s Vice-President/Athletics Director Terry Connor. An even 100 of those are from Northern Kentucky with an even larger contingent – 146 — from across the Ohio River from commuting distance in Southwest Ohio.
But that’s not the end of our sports geography lesson for the Crestview Hills school that is moving from the NAIA’s Mid-South Conference to the NCAA’s Division II Great Midwest Conference for the 2023-24 school year.
Seven TMU teams also list 31 international athletes from 14 countries with soccer dominating, as we might expect, with 24 of those – 19 for the men, five more for the women.
TMU athletes come from a bunch of places in Spain, from the capital of Madrid to Santander to Rocafort to Las Palmas de Canaria in the Canary Islands to Vigo in Galicia. Same for the Netherlands, from Amsterdam to Arnhem to Beuningen to Didam. From Manchester, and Eckington in the United Kingdom. From Cardiff and Ewloe in Wales. And from Ballyclare in Northern Ireland. They come from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Cusco in Peru. They come from Beirut, Lebanon, and the Ivory Coast. From Cordoba, Vera Cruz, Mexico and Panama City, Panama. They come from Oppegaard and Aalesund in Norway and Caracas and Valencia in Venezuela. From Port-of-Spain, Trinidad-Tobago, and Spanish Town, Jamaica. From Masone and Gornate Olona, Italy. Also from Komoka, Ontario, Canada, and last but not least, from Kaduna, Nigeria, the hometown of 6-foot-11 basketball transfer Abba Lawal, who arrives by way of Cincinnati’s Withrow High and Alabama A&M.
There are also some interesting out-of-the-area American hometowns for Saints’ athletes. There’s an archer – Esteban Munguia — from Chula Vista, Calif., by way of Williamstown High School, and a pair of sisters on the women’s tennis team, Aman and Raman Dail, who list North Hollywood, Calif., home but who graduated from Walton-Verona High School which is about as far away from North Hollywood as you can get in this country.
All told, TMU athletes come from 11 states – obviously the Tri-State area of Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana and then California, Florida, Arizona, Illinois, Utah, Idaho, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Football has the most Southwest Ohio athletes at TMU with 32 while women’s soccer has 20 with baseball adding 13 and women’s lacrosse and softball with nine each.
One of the pluses for TMU as a member of the southern-facing Mid-South Conference with a number of Kentucky member schools was the way TMU was able to recruit downstate. A total of 39 Saints’ athletes are from Kentucky outside Northern Kentucky.
“The thing I’m noticing as we move to our new conference is how we’re expanding our recruiting in Ohio,” Connor says of the Ohio-centric Great Midwest. “But it also looks like we’re expanding it in Kentucky as well, especially Louisville, as one of just three NCAA Division II teams in the state with Kentucky Wesleyan and Kentucky State.”
Sounding like a recruiter himself, Connor says Thomas More’s recruiting success can be attributed to three things: “great athletics, great academics and great location.”
NKU HAS A DIFFERENT PROFILE, LOOKING NATIONALLY: Not only do the Division I Norse have fewer sports – 15 – and fewer athletes – 260 – with fewer local athletes – 43 vs. TMU’s 100 from Northern Kentucky and 50 from Southwest Ohio vs. TMU’s 146 – but there are a couple of places NKU rules as a Division I program must with much higher scholarship aid requirements. But also note that NKU does not have football, which in the summer numbers 85 of the TMU listed athletes.
NKU draws its 25 international athletes from 16 countries. They come from Vilnius, Lithuania, and Nicosia, Cyprus. From Adelaide and New South Wales, Australia, and the Republic of the Congo. Five come from Canada – from British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Alberta and two from Ontario. They come from Modena and Vicenza in Italy. From Jalisco and Pachuca, Hidalgo, Mexico. They come from Guatemala City, Guatemala, and Hyderabad, India. From Harpenden, UK; Buchholz and Lahoe, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany; Taastrop, Denmark; Tel Aviv, Israel; Toulouse, France; Lkomorniki, Poland; Kyjov, Czech Republic; and Vic, Spain.
From the world to Highland Heights, from Asia, Africa, Europe and much of North America (including Central America with Guatemala) — and from 20 states — to Northern Kentucky.
“Every time we go national, the region goes national,” Vice-President/Director of Athletics Christina Roybal said recently of athletics’ role for the Highland Heights school that she described as “coming off a record-setting year” with men’s basketball and women’s softball making the NCAA tournaments.
“We’re the front porch for the college,” says Roybal, an alum of Saint Mary’s in California by way of Fresno State and Northern Iowa who fits the national profile she talks about in challenging the NKU program to do more. “We aspire to be a premier mid-major program.” And that requires an aggressive recruiting profile.
If TMU rules locally, give NKU the national profile. Norse athletes come from 20 states starting with the Tri-State – Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana – in addition to Alabama, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Texas, Arizona, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, California, Tennessee, West Virginia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Missouri, Florida, Washington and Virginia.
Some notable numbers:
• NKU’s men’s tennis team, as is pretty much the case across the board in American colleges, it seems, has seven international players among its eight-man roster. The women have five internationals on their seven-person roster.
• NKU’s women’s softball 21-player roster has one Northern Kentuckian and 20 nonlocals not unlike the numbers for NKU baseball with just three of the 36-man roster from Northern Kentucky. Six softballers are from Indiana, four from Illinois, three from Louisville.
• NKU women’s soccer team has 11 players from Southwest Ohio, just two from Northern Kentucky.
So give Thomas More the numbers edge in Northern Kentucky and Greater Cincinnati, give NKU the national numbers and call the international competition a draw.
Dan Weber writes a sports column for the Northern Kentucky Tribune. Contact him at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him @dweber3440 on Twitter.