Reusse: Notre Dame football coach Marcus Freeman still has a big fan in St. Paul native Sean Sweeney

Sean Sweeney holds a lofty position in the basketball underworld that exists in St. Paul. He was a freshman at Cretin-Derham Hall when he started showing up at “Noonball,’’ the collection of wily old hoopers who had been finding gyms across the city to play cutthroat games at that time of day since the mid-’70s.

He shared the backcourt with Joe Mauer and Steve Sir when the Raiders fell to Osseo, 88-82, in an all-time great Class 4A semifinal in the 2001 state basketball tournament.

He was a freshman at St. Thomas, transferred to Wisconsin-Green Bay for a season, returned to the Tommies and was a fierce guard on a pair of MIAC title teams.

He’s now 40 and has made a career as an NBA coach, currently as a lead defensive assistant for Jason Kidd with the Dallas Mavericks. As you might recall, the Mavericks put an end to the Timberwolves’ second-ever fabulous season with a 4-1 win in the Western Conference finals this spring.

Yet, when I started asking some of my St. Paul pals of Irish descent early this week to identify a local who would have been saddened by Notre Dame losing a home football game to Northern Illinois, the answer was:

“Number one has to be Sweeney. He owns a house in South Bend, so he has a place to stay when he makes it there for a game on a weekend.”

This can’t be true, can it?

“Friends will use the house once in a while. I’ll donate a weekend there and game tickets to Tom Flood over at St. Agnes, and he can auction that off for their athletic fund.

“I’ll get to some games. Jason Kidd and our other coaches came up for the California game in 2022, got to met Marcus, and we had a great time.”

That would be Marcus Freeman, then 36 and in his first year as Notre Dame’s head coach. That Cal game in mid-September was Freeman’s first win, after a road loss at Ohio State and then the 26-21 upset suffered to Marshall, a non-power conference team, at home.

The Northern Illinois loss last Saturday was worse than that one, since this was supposed to be a much-better Notre Dame team – having risen to No. 5 in the country after opening with a 23-13 win at Texas A&M.

As skepticism rose toward Freeman after Saturday’s brutal 16-14 loss to NIU, Sweeney remained confidently in the third-year coach’s camp.

Part of Sweeney’s passion for Notre Dame comes from the fact friends from Cretin-Derham Hall played there in the early 2000s, including outstanding offensive lineman Ryan Harris and also Marcus Freeman, not the coach but a highly recruited tight end from the Raiders.

The No. 1 reason for Sweeney’s Notre Dame football passion, though:

“I come from an Irish Catholic family in St. Paul, where for three generations the most important thing happening on a fall Saturday has been watching or listening on the radio to the Notre Dame football game,” he said. “It started with my grandpa, Patrick Sweeney. It was passed on to my father, Tim, and also my mother – she was Nancy O’Connell – and then my brother, Michael, and me.