University Bellarmine University Location Louisville, Kentucky | Athletic director Scott Wiegandt Varsity teams 22 | |
Conference GLVC (East Division)
SoCon (men's lacrosse)
ECAC (field hockey) NCAA Division II
Division I (men's lacrosse) | ||
The Bellarmine Knights are the athletic teams that represent Bellarmine University, located in Louisville, Kentucky, in NCAA intercollegiate sporting competitions.
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The majority of Bellarmine's 22 athletic teams compete at the Division II level, although the men's lacrosse program belongs to Division I. The Knights are members of the Great Lakes Valley Conference for most sports; in the six GLVC sports in which the conference conducts divisional play (baseball, men's and women's basketball, men's and women's tennis, and women's volleyball), Bellarmine is part of the conference's East Division. The Knights have separate memberships in two sports that are not sponsored by the GLVC. Men's lacrosse competes in the Southern Conference, and field hockey plays in the Eastern College Athletic Conference. Bellarmine originally joined the GLVC in 1978.
Championships
On March 26, 2011, the Knights won the NCAA Men's Division II Basketball Championship.
Lacrosse
The university announced the athletic department would begin sponsoring men's lacrosse in 2004. BU hired Jack McGetrick as the program's first head coach. In 2005 the team competed as independent members in NCAA Division I. In 2007 the Knights joined the Great Western Lacrosse League (GWLL) after the league lost Butler to athletic department cuts. In 2010 the GWLL ceased operations after Notre Dame left the league for the Big East. Bellarmine and the remaining members of the GWLL joined the ECAC Lacrosse League.
Tragedy struck the Knights Lacrosse program in October 2010 when coach McGetrick died after a long battle with cancer. Since founding the program he led the Knights to a 45-41 record. Before Bellarmine, McGetrick coached of the University of Hartford Hawks for 11 seasons. McGetrick ranks in the top-50 of Division I men's lacrosse coaches with a record of 132-115.
The 2014 season was Bellarmine's last in ECAC Lacrosse. After the Big Ten Conference announced it would begin sponsoring both men's and women's lacrosse in the 2014–15 school year (2015 season), which took two of the six schools then in the league, Bellarmine announced it would become a lacrosse-only member of the Atlantic Sun Conference (A-Sun) effective in July 2014. However, before the conference move took effect, the A-Sun and Southern Conference (SoCon) announced an agreement under which sponsorship of men's lacrosse would switch from the A-Sun to the SoCon after the 2014 season. Accordingly, Bellarmine lacrosse began SoCon play in the 2015 season.
Basketball
Men's basketball has been a part of Bellarmine's athletic department since the school's founding in 1950. That same year student Ted Wade became the first black player on an integrated college basketball team in Kentucky. The basketball program has been coached by 11 different men and is currently headed by Louisville native, Scott Davenport. Davenport is one of two Bellarmine coaches who have also guided teams to the state high school championship. He did it in 1988 at Ballard High School (Louisville, Kentucky). The other coach who moved up to the college level was Joe Reibel, who won with St. Xavier High School (Louisville) in 1962. Reibel is Bellarmine's winningest coach with a record of 346-277. A unique Bellarmine coach was Bob Valvano. Valvano is an ESPN personality and was a member of Mensa, an international organization for only the brightest two percent of people on Earth. Arguably the most famous Bellarmine coach was Alex Groza, the Fabulous Five (Kentucky Wildcats) great at the University of Kentucky. Groza was an All-American, Gold Medal winner in the 1948 London Olympics and first team NBA.
In its history, the Knights have won two GLVC men's basketball titles and three NCAA Midwest Regional titles. On March 26, 2011, the Knights won its first NCAA Division II National Championship, led by guards Jeremy Kendle and Braydon Hobbs. The Knights defeated BYU–Hawaii for the title, 71-68. The championship game aired on national television on the CBS network. An estimated 2,906 fans were in attendance for the championship game. Most of which were Bellarmine fans that had made the 900-mile (1,400 km) trip from Louisville to watch the Knights compete in the championship held in Springfield, Massachusetts at the MassMutual Center.
Swimming and diving
In 2012, Bellarmine University announced the start of its swimming program.