Sticking to one of her favorite sayings (“It’s better to wear out than to rust out.”), 102-year-old Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt will accompany the Loyola Chicago Ramblers to Pittsburgh for their first-round game in the NCAA Tournament.

Contacted Monday morning, Loyola Chicago associate athletic director Bill Behrns said, “We are anticipating that Sister will be making the trip to Pittsburgh with the team.”

The Ramblers, the No. 10 seed in the South Region, plan to arrive Wednesday in advance of their game at 12:15 p.m. Friday against No. 7 Ohio State.

Sister Jean, the Loyola team chaplain, captured the admiration and hearts of basketball fans throughout the U.S. in 2018 when she was courtside for the Ramblers’ run to the Final Four.

Nearly every major media outlet in the U.S., including The New York Times, CNN, People Magazine and ESPN, produced features about her while the Ramblers kept on winning.

Loyola was a No. 11 seed entering the tournament and scored one-, two- and one-point victories against Miami, Tennessee and Nevada before pummeling Kansas State, 78-62, to reach the Final Four.

The journey ended there with a semifinal loss to Michigan, but Sister Jean’s celebrity already had been cemented. There were reports a Sister Jean bobblehead was selling for $300 on eBay.

At the Final Four in San Antonio, Texas, she held a 17-minute news conference on Good Friday in which she refused to reveal her message to the Ramblers during the pregame prayer.

“I can’t tell you what I’m going to tell them,” she told reporters, “because I’m afraid you’re going to tell Michigan what we’re going to do. I don’t want that to happen.

“We’re going to pray to God. Ask God to help us, and we’re going to tell God we’ll be there, too, to do our part.”

Born Dolores Bertha Schmidt in San Francisco, on Aug. 21, 1919, she was the oldest of three children in a devout Catholic family, according to a story on the Loyola website. She played high school basketball, but her life’s path was set in third grade where her teacher was a member of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM).

In her prayers, she said, “Please, God, tell me what I should do, but please tell me that I am to be a BVM.”

Sister Jean has been affiliated with either Mundelein College in Chicago or Loyola since 1961.

In 1994, she was ready to retire at the age of 75 when she was called to take on a role helping student-athletes with academics so they could remain eligible. Later, she became the basketball team’s chaplain, offering pregame prayers and advice to players. Fittingly, she is a member of the Loyola Athletics Hall of Fame.

“I keep saying that to myself,” she said in a 1998 interview, “don’t let yourself sit around here and do nothing.”

When former Loyola coach Porter Moser, now at Oklahoma, arrived at Loyola in 2011, she gave him a scouting report on each player. When Moser left Loyola and took the head coaching job at Oklahoma last year, he said he called Sister Jean “right away.”

“She still sends me an email after every single game,” Moser told the Peoria (Ill.) Journal Star in 2017. “There is no human like her.”

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