‘People just sent money in’: What happened after St Peter’s basketball fairytale?

Take it from the president at Saint Peter’s himself: Life has not quite returned to normal at the tiny Jersey City university, whose basketball team stunned the sports world in March by becoming the first No 15 seed in history to reach the NCAA tournament’s Elite Eight.

“This may sound crazy,” Eugene J Cornacchia tells the Guardian, referring to the student body, “but they seem to be walking with more confidence, more spring in their step.”

The most obvious effect was on the players, who went from competing in front of a few hundred fans to being broadcast to millions across America. “We generated a lot of publicity for our school,” Daryl Banks III, the Peacocks’ junior guard who transferred this week to St Bonaventure, said after the loss to North Carolina. “So it’s just going to help the school out in general. Caught the attention of everybody who wants to come here. I think just what we did will have an impact on everybody who knows about the school now.”

The unexpected injection of good vibrations was a wonderful aftereffect, of course, but, perhaps more important in the long-term, the school’s coffers have been given a big jolt, too – and not just because Saint Peter’s is selling more $22 Peacocks T-shirts at its online merchandise store.

More people are donating money to the school. Cornacchia has a juicy stat: Between 9 and 26 March 2021, a year before Saint Peter’s historic NCAA run, the university received 149 “gifts” totaling $475,000. In the same timeframe this year, as the Peacocks beat college basketball giants such as Kentucky and Purdue, the school received 414 gifts totaling $2.3m.

“I wish they could do this every year,” Cornacchia says, laughing.

He says, “A lot of people just sent money in – they didn’t