WashU ROTC Basketball Stuns En Route to National Championship

“Where are you from, and why are you wearing football jerseys?”

The Washington University Reserve Officers Training Corps’ (ROTC) basketball team may not have looked the part. It was their first appearance at Notre Dame’s Flyin’ Irish Basketball Invitational, the largest ROTC sporting event in the nation with nearly four decades of history. The team went up against ROTC programs with more than 30 times their number of cadets, but they did not back down from the fight. Mounting a Cinderella run to the championship, they defeated the Fighting Irish on their home court.

The tournament, which takes place yearly in South Bend, Indiana, on the Notre Dame campus, consisted of 30 other schools from around the nation. Each team played three games of pool play, and then the top sixteen teams were entered into a single-elimination bracket.

Heading in, the team itself knew little about the tournament, its structure, and the stakes of the competition. Said sophomore Andrew Rudolph, “We didn’t really know what to expect, in regards to the teams and the competition, but also the setting of South Bend.”

The team was led by Sophomore Caden Perry, who served as squad captain. Perry held tryouts, registered the team and figured out the logistics of the tournament, a hectic process for the first-time team. The team lacked the funding and registered too late to wear official jerseys, so they were forced to don WashU Recreational Football pinnies. “Many of the teams we played had actual basketball jerseys with their school name on them, and many schools also had last names on the back of the jerseys,” said Perry. “You could tell they’d been training for the tournament for quite some time, and they take it very seriously year to year.”

In the first round, WashU ROTC beat Marquette

University ROTC, who traveled from Milwaukee, WI, by a score of 38-33. In their second group stage game, the WashU squad defeated the Air Force ROTC cadets from the University of Kentucky, a school known for its Division I basketball program that has churned out the likes of Anthony Davis, Devin Booker, Julius Randle and countless other NBA AllStars. They finished off the group stage with a mercyrule rout of University of Colorado-Boulder.

The team’s first official practice had been on Jan.

22, just 15 days before the tournament began. Most players on the team had high school basketball experience, but none had played basketball at the Division 3 level. Their secret to success? High-quality pickup basketball on the glossy courts of Sumers Recreation Center.

“We play at the Rec Center a lot and we play together a lot… that’s how our team chemistry was established,” Perry said.

Heading into the elimination games, the squad scouted their next opponent, Texas A&M, a team representing the nation’s largest ROTC corps. Despite being outnumbered and outsized, WashU eked out a four point victory, a game which Rudolph described as “very physical.” The team then pulled off a 10-point comeback versus Indiana University, and a tight win versus Virginia Tech secured their spot in the finals.

In the finals, WashU got off to an early lead against Notre Dame Army ROTC, before playing conservatively in the second half. The team took advantage of the lack of a shot clock and played keep-away for long periods of time, securing a 27-19 victory. Perry was tasked with locking up Notre Dame’s top player, while senior point guard Gavin Morse won the unofficial team MVP award.

Despite losing two key players for next year’s squad, Perry says that the WashU group plans on making a reappearance at next year’s tournament, perhaps with a women’s team as well. “This establishes us as the best ROTC basketball team in the country,” he said, “People would be surprised if we didn’t come back.”