The road to playing for St. Thomas MBB for Glenview natives Cunningham and Martinelli
GLENVIEW, Ill. — For many young athletes, it’s a dream to play at the collegiate level, whether it be NCAA Division I, II, III, NAIA or Junior College. It’s also an even greater accomplishment for those who do get the opportunity, especially in a sport like basketball, where according to website scholarshipstats.com, 5.9 percent of high school boys basketball players will play at the college level and only 0.9 percent will play at the Division I level.
Loyola Academy graduate Kevin Cunningham and Glenbrook South graduate Dom Martinelli, are both getting the Division I opportunity at the University of St. Thomas, a small private school in Minnesota. However, they got there in two totally different ways.
Cunningham, a Glenview native, signed with the Tommies in 2018 after a Loyola career that saw him earned a Third-Team All-State nod after helping lead the Ramblers to a regional title his senior year.
However, when Cunningham signed with the Minnesota school, it was still a Division III member and the thought of even playing at the Division I level wasn’t on the horizon.
But then in May 2019, the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference involuntarily removed St. Thomas from the conference, leaving St. Thomas without a conference.
“There were a lot of like questions that like people had, like how the jump would be handled and things like that,” Cunningham said. “The jump’s been handled really well, I think the school’s done a great job.
“But I also think we didn’t expect to go Division I in a year either. it was crazy, to think ‘Oh my God, next year we’re going to D-I,’ it’s also cool because growing up everyone wants to play division one. So it was just really, really kind of a crazy situation that I think most people have embraced and it’s been going really well.”
That move by the MIAC led St. Thomas in search of its next steps, whether that be joining a different Division III conference, going independent, moving up to Division II or making the unprecedented move of going from Division III to Division I.
After a couple hiccups along the way, including having to mitigate the move while also dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, the Tommies were approved to become the first-ever school to jump up two levels. The football team would be members of the Football Championship Series’ Pioneer League, the women’s hockey team to the Western Collegiate Hockey Association, the men’s hockey team to the newly-formed Central Collegiate Hockey Association and the rest of the school’s athletic teams to The Summit League.
Through 11 games, St. Thomas is 5-6 with Division I wins over Southern Illinois-Edwardsville, St. Francis College and Niagara University. And even in the team’s six losses, only one has been larger than 10 points, with half of the losses coming by six points or less.
“We go into every game thinking we’ve got a good shot,” Cunningham said. “We know that we have the team that, if we put it all together, we’re going to give ourselves a good chance. And, honestly it’s just been fun. I think the whole team’s been a lot of fun this year. A lot of people don’t expect much out of us because we’re D-III and we’re just kind of going a game at a time and just enjoying it all.”
“Coming into here, that was something that I thought about. How would we compete?,” Martinelli said. “We’ve shown everyone that we’ve played against that we deserve to be on the court with them and we just show no fear to anybody. We’re just as good, we’re just as talented, we have the players that we need to win every single game on our schedule this year. Everybody on our team, all of our coaches, our players need that.
“The main thing for us, just knowing that after that first game we did lose, but we knew that we could have played a lot better and we should’ve won. So we knew that we belonged right after that game. We just have trusted that we have the players now, we don’t have to wait years to build this program, that it’s already been built and it could be used at the D-I level.”
Martinelli, who has known Cunningham since the two were little kids growing up in Glenview, took a bit of a different path to St. Paul (Minn.).
After a stellar career at Glenbrook South that saw him finish his career with more than 2,000 points scored, as well as a First-Team All-State honors after his senior year, Martinelli decided to take his talents to Evanston and walk onto the Northwestern basketball team.
After appearing in four games as a freshman last season, the GBS grad decided to enter the transfer portal and see what other options he might have. Coincidentally it was his brother Nick, who will play next year at Elon University, that got his interest piqued in the Tommies program because they were actually recruiting him at the time.
“When I was looking to transfer, I knew this was a place that I really wanted to look at,” Martinelli said. “We’re going division one for the first year and I thought it’d be a cool experience to have. To start building a program in a new direction that has a long history of winning and a great culture, that’s mainly why I decided to come here.
“Towards the end of, the spring, I knew I was looking to transfer and my little brother actually visited here and he told me he loved it. He said he thought it’d be like a great place for me to go. So I thought it’d be a good opportunity too, reached out to the coaches and they thought that I could help the team a lot too. I really came here because I thought about the playing time and just being able to be a part of something that’s special.”
There was one slight issue for Martinelli before he got to suit up for St. Thomas, though. The sophomore broke his foot this summer and needed surgery to repair it, knocking him out of any preseason camp and a number of early-season games.
Martinelli finally got back on the court the week of December 12th and played in his first game as a Tommie December 14th, in the team’s 109-50 win over Northland College. He finished with 10 points in 14 minutes off the bench.
“It’s been super nice,” he said about getting back onto the court. “It’s tough to watch from the sideline, especially when I came here to help the team and hopefully get minutes, and then obviously I’ve not been able to do that because of my injury. But I’ve been getting back and it’s been really nice being able to play with the guys again.”
St. Thomas has always recruited the Chicago area well in most sports. Cunningham and Martinelli are joined by Loyola graduate Bennett Kwiecinski and Benet graduate Will Engels as the four Chicagoans on the St. Thomas roster. Other than the four and one player from Wisconsin, everyone else on the roster is from Minnesota, so the rivalry between the Minnesotans and Chicago-area players can sometimes get fierce.
“It’s been very cool, obviously I played high school ball with Bennett, so it was cool to get him here and then Dom, I don’t know if we played together, when we were like fifth grade maybe,” Cunningham said. “So it’s kind of wild that like we playing college now, how it all came like full circle.”
“They (the Minnesota players) all think that Minnesota basketball, all high school is the best thing ever,” Martinelli said. “So me and Kevin, we try to tell they don’t understand how good Chicago basketball is. So it’s always funny to joke around about stuff like that, but it is a cool dynamic having a lot of people from the same area. Everybody is familiar with each other, our towns, our areas, how we play.”
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