All-Star Nun Keeps College Basketball Players on Academic Toes : Education: Sister Rose Ann Fleming, academic adviser to Xavier University teams, has MVP status.

She’s been president of Trinity College in Washington, D.C., where she hobnobbed with senators and congressmen and helped host the Pope when he visited the capital.

She graduated from college magna cum laude and then added a Ph.D., a law degree, and an MBA.

But of all her awards she is proudest of a plaque on her wall that names her as the Most Valuable Player on Xavier University’s highly touted basketball team.

That’s some accomplishment for a 59-year-old Roman Catholic nun who stands just 5-feet-5.

Meet Sister Rose Ann Fleming.

Musketeer Coach Pete Gillen never dreamed he would one day make her the team’s MVP when seven years ago she became academic adviser to the team.

“I thought she would be a fish out of water, but I was wrong,” Gillen said. “Nobody’s in the same ballpark with her.

“I was sure my guys would buffalo her. I didn’t think she could handle it. Working with these inner-city kids was new to her.

“She got duped a few times and so did I, but these were kids who would lie like most people breathe. You can’t fool her too often. She’s pretty street-smart for a religious lady.”

Gillen had not given out the MVP award since he came to Xavier in 1985. The coach said it’s against his philosophy.

“There’s an old saying that the strength of the wolf is in the pack, so we try to keep the pack more or less together rather than create alpha wolves and beta wolves,” he said.

Why the exception?

“She’s the one person we can’t lose,” Gillen said. “We can lose a Byron Larkin, a Jamal Walker, a Tyrone Hill and somehow still be competitive, but if we lost her, we’d be hurting.

“She’s irreplaceable. You can’t get anyone to do what she does with her enthusiasm, her talent, her intelligence, her compassion.”

Given Fleming’s ivory-tower background, one in which she proved to be a good fund-raiser, the job of academic adviser to athletes seems at first an odd choice. Odder yet, when Sister Rose Ann, as the players call her to her face, concedes that her real concerns are First Amendment issues as they pertain to private schools. That’s why she got her MBA and law degrees.

Fleming was accepted at Georgetown Law School, but came to Xavier in 1982 because her father was ailing. She and her twin brother, a CPA with his own firm in their native Cincinnati, both wanted to be with him during his last years. Her mother died when she was a youngster.

Gillen also admires her energy and her persistence. For instance, one student was skipping classes and she knew it.

“She rang his phone 64 times and then hung up for five seconds,” he said. “She called back and let it ring 65 more times. It was driving him crazy. He answered on the 129th ring.”

The students then learned to take the phones off the hook.

So Fleming, who gets up at 5 a.m. to jog 3 miles each day before attending morning Mass, simply switched strategy. She started banging on their doors.

“We’re asking the impossible of her. She’s in the world of presidents and governors and politicians and doctors and lawyers and we’re asking her to walk in the world of student athletes, some of them inner-city kids with some pretty tough backgrounds. Not many people can wear hats in both worlds and be successful. She can.”

Gillen was willing to take a risk to give Fleming the authority she needs.

“She has benching power and I don’t know of many other coaches who give that to academic advisers,” Gillen said. “She’s only had to use it a few times, but word spreads quickly.

“Once, it was during a tournament. It was our eighth or ninth best player and she took him out for five or six games,” he said. “That was in the beginning.”

What if it had been the star?

Same rules, said Gillen. Doesn’t that worry him about his own security?

“Sure,” he said. “There are a lot of piranha fish in the Ohio River and if I start losing games, that’s where I’m going. But Sister Fleming can’t work if she’s just got bark. She needs bite.”

One superstar, who apparently did not write term papers or take tests in high school, expected the same perks at Xavier. He did nothing about a major paper for an introduction to philosophy class. When the paper was due, the team was playing and he simply ignored it. But he didn’t reckon with Fleming.

She announced to the startled player, just under 7 feet tall, that he, indeed, was going to do the work. Fleming, who wears street clothes save for a large cross on a chain around her neck, dragged him off to the library and called in the resource librarian.

“This player was really very resistant to having to do any kind of intellectual work to get what was necessary to get the grade,” she recalls. “I was equally determined this was going to happen. And so we walked from book to book and we stayed there for a couple of days, literally from morning to night until the work was done. I didn’t have to do that twice.”

Would that player today be employed by the National Basketball Assn.?

“I think I’ll pass on that,” replies the discreet nun.

Gillen, 44, who has been coaching for 17 years, puts much of the blame on the parents who don’t care about the players’ grades. They just worry whether he is going to get kicked off the team.

He and Sister Rose Ann are determined that they are going to play good basketball and get a Jesuit education at the same time. Both have been dismayed when they have called in parents for a chat and the parents don’t seem to care that their son is not making it academically. Instead, they want to know if he is going to be kicked off the team.

“I know they don’t come here to get a chance to play in the minor leagues. They’re all here for the NBA. They all dream, every one, and we want them to keep the dream. In the movie, ‘Flash Dance,’ if you give up the dream, you die.”

Fleming concedes that she was naive about the tremendous pressures that are put on basketball players and, at first, perhaps demanded too much of them. She and Gillen compromised, but Gillen stresses that Fleming has the last call.

C. B. Davenport, the father of one of last year’s stars, Michael Davenport of Grand Rapids, Mich., said Fleming was a big deciding factor in sending his son to Xavier. A supervisor for General Motors for 25 years, the senior Davenport used all of his vacation time to watch his son play. He said he has a younger son who just might be better than Michael.

“He’ll go to Xavier,” Davenport said. “They make sure they get an education there.”

Although Fleming is responsible for all Xavier athletes, her focus is the basketball team, the money sport for this small private university, which has been in the NCAA playoffs for the last five years.

Fleming goes on road trips with the team, sits in freezing arenas while they practice, turns out to watch them scrimmage. She talks with them on the bus, advises them on courses.

“I can’t make everyone want a 3.0 grade average. But I can convince them that the eligibility rules of a 2.0 are not doing them any favor when it comes time to get a job,” she said. “I tell them employers are looking for academic achievement and if they have that plus the publicity from being on the Xavier team, they’ve got a good shot.”

She feels that although they complain, the players like the security of the structure she provides.

“It’s not too cool to pull out a book on quantitative analysis while you’re at a big tournament, but they’ve got me to blame it on,” she said.