After a long day of St.Thomas Athletics, Dr. Phil Esten will lean into a quieter room in his home and find the piano. Some nights it’s the guitar. The ritual is the same. Fingers find a riff, a phrase becomes a melody, and the noise of a long day settles into order. It isn’t hard to see the metaphor. What Esten has done at St. Thomas looks a lot like composition: align the instruments, set the tempo, cue the right solo at the right time, and trust the whole to become something bigger than its parts.
Four years after the Tommies began the most audacious climb in modern college athletics, the tune has become a full arrangement… and a good one too. St. Thomas is a full Division I member, postseason-eligible, with trophies in the case and cranes still on campus. In a landscape where most programs stumble for decades after moving up, the Tommies found a higher key.
From Exile to Evolution
The origin story has its own place in realignment lore. In May 2019, after years of winning at a level peers deemed unsustainable, St. Thomas was “involuntarily removed” from the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (MIAC). The easy prediction was a soft landing in Division II. Esten, five months into his tenure as athletic director and fresh from stops at Ohio State, Minnesota, Cal, and Penn State, saw a different path.
“When you look at the trajectory of this university over the last 50 years, Division I was what was next,” he said.
St. Thomas had gone from college to university, from all-male to co-ed, added campuses in Minneapolis and Rome, launched a downtown business school, and added law, engineering, and health. Measured without the nameplate, with strong academics, outcomes, job placement, endowment, enrollment, the profile looked like Marquette, Creighton, Dayton, and even Villanova. The only mismatch was the logo.
The NCAA granted a waiver in 2020, allowing St. Thomas to jump straight from Division III to Division I. Eighteen sports found a home in the Summit League. Football landed in the Pioneer Football League. Women’s hockey joined the WCHA; men’s hockey the CCHA. The Tommies became the only NCAA member to reclassify directly from D-III to D-I under modern rules.
Building at Division I Scale
Big transitions are supposed to strain the seams.
“We never had to break old habits,” he said. “We started fresh.”
Scholarships had to be built from scratch. Compliance couldn’t be an office down the hall; it had to be part of the culture. Sport administration became a pillar, not a title. Esten reorganized the department into five business verticals: Administration, Development, Internal Operations, External Affairs, and Student-Athlete Welfare and Development. The goal wasn’t to mimic the Power Four. It was to act like a mature Division I enterprise on day one.
That meant making campus an active duet partner. Division I travel pushed classes from day trips to coast-to-coast swings. Faculty helped shape missed-class policies and priority registration so athletes could schedule around flights and practices instead of the other way around. Additionally, Esten noted having a strong Faculty Athletics Representative was “crucial to the success of the transition.” The academic returns followed: Tommie athletes posted a 3.42 average GPA — three-tenths above the student body — and a 95 percent Graduation Success Rate.
Change is never frictionless.
“There are moments when missions seem to collide,” Esten said. “You work through them. Alignment from trustees to the president to athletics makes it possible.”
That alignment has bled outward. A year into the move, other units began talking about making their areas feel “more Division I,” not in budget, but in standards and outcomes.
Watering the Grass
If you press him on realignment for the Tommies, Esten doesn’t bite.
“The grass is greenest where you water it,” he said.
The Tommies love the four leagues they’re in, and they’ve tried to be high-value members in each. Win in the Summit. Compete in the Pioneer. Build hockey the right way. If music changes and the chairs move again, St. Thomas intends to be stable, not restless.
The results argue he’s on tempo. In the first four Division I seasons, St. Thomas claimed four conference championships. Men’s basketball surged to 19 wins in year two and played for a league crown. Men’s hockey reached its conference final. Football won a Pioneer League title and cracked the FCS top-25. For a department supposedly headed for growing pains, the growth has been the headline.
Philanthropy as Fuel
Facilities used to be an arms race. Esten calls them table stakes now. Recruits don’t compare what you have as much as what you lack. St. Thomas chose to sprint. The university announced the $183 million Lee & Penny Anderson Arena with a lead gift of $75 million, believed to be the largest athletics gift in Minnesota history and among the biggest nationally. The building provides basketball and hockey with a modern home and delivers premium inventory to sponsors and fans.
Just as important as the price tag is the source.
“It’s almost exclusively private philanthropy,” Esten said.
The department launched its first-ever annual fund, the 1904 Club, five years ago, alongside a points system to set clear access and rewards. An advisory group raised $15 million in startup funds to grease the runway from D-III to D-I. Since 2019, athletics has raised nearly $200 million across facilities, scholarships, and operations. Tickets are trending up. Multimedia revenue has lagged, but the arena is already changing that conversation with more assets to sell.
And as Esten explains, investment isn’t only about walls and seats.
“If we’re going to be successful, we need to make sure that our student-athletes have an experience that’s commensurate with the Division I experience,” he said. “That means strength and conditioning facilities, training facilities, fueling stations, locker rooms, and the coaches and staff to support that. On the other side of that coin, our fans are going to expect a Division I experience when they come for the entertainment of Division I athletics as well, which will help yield revenue that we can reinvest back into the student-athlete experience.”
The Broader Stage
Esten also recognizes the alignment between athletics and institutional growth. The timing, he notes, is crucial.
“During this transition, we often talked about student population, and we all know we’re at the verge of the enrollment cliff right now,” he said. “How do we try to limit and mitigate exposure from an enrollment standpoint as an institution? Well, one of the best levers to pull with national visibility, of course, is athletics.”
He breaks the benefit into three parts.
“First, it allows strategic alumni engagement in ways we’ve never been able to do before,” Esten said. “Playing football in San Diego and at Harvard, basketball at Creighton, women’s hockey in Washington, D.C., and softball at Oklahoma allows us to engage alumni in a strategic way we couldn’t before — or even connect to academic initiatives.”
“Secondly, how do we best leverage earned media in that space? Football was just at Stetson, so we were in Central Florida. We’ll be in the media on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. How do we use that to tell the story, not just of athletics, but of all the great things happening at St. Thomas?”
“And thirdly, how do we use it as a recruitment strategy? Not just recruiting student-athletes, but using this as a tool for overall enrollment.”
For Esten, the Division I experience is a platform, one that can stabilize a private university in a shifting higher-education market.
The Conductor
Esten’s story loops back to St. Paul. He played baseball here before earning a master’s at Ohio State and a PhD in kinesiology at Minnesota. He managed ticket windows, wrote strategic plans, helped shepherd TCF Bank Stadium from the drawing board to ribbon-cutting, and then ran external units in Berkeley and operations in State College.
Ask for the stray detail you’d never guess, and the answer is the piano again — and that self-taught guitar he picked up in college when his mom wouldn’t let him haul a baby grand piano into a dorm. On a good night, he’ll play until the house goes quiet. Composition is a reflection and reset. It’s also a habit, which might be the best way to describe what St. Thomas has built: not a one-off crescendo, but a repeatable way of working.
So, what’s next for the Tommies?
The prudent answer is boring and true. Win where you are. Sell the new building. Keep the GPA high. Grow hockey inside a new arena. Be a great partner in four leagues. If the market lurches, be ready, not loud.
The bolder answer is already on the record. In June, the NCAA Board of Directors made St. Thomas a full Division I member. The Tommies are eligible for NCAA tournaments. They have a modern home rising, a donor base that believes, and a campus that now speaks Division I as fluently as it once spoke Division III. The composition has moved from theme to variations. The melody is familiar. The dynamics keep changing.
The room is quiet again. Somewhere on campus, the lights flick off above a new row of seats. Somewhere at home, a few piano notes find their place. The music comes naturally. For St. Thomas, under Esten’s hand, so does the rise.
