Gonzaga University: Seven Students and a Gravel Lot

Father Joseph Cataldo was a Jesuit priest who had been working among the Spokane and Nez Perce peoples for years when he decided this raw railroad town needed a school. In eighteen eighty-one he purchased three hundred and twenty acres on the north bank of the Spokane River, land people called 'the old piece of gravel near the falls', and six years later opened Gonzaga College with seven students. The college was named for Aloysius Gonzaga, a sixteenth-century Italian Jesuit who died in Rome caring for plague victims.

By the turn of the century, enrollment had grown to two hundred forty-four, making it the largest Catholic college in the Northwest. A law school opened in nineteen twelve, the same year the college became Gonzaga University. The Jesuits built it piece by piece to meet whatever Spokane needed: teachers, engineers, lawyers, business professionals.

Then there is Bing Crosby, class of nineteen twenty-five, who left before graduating to join a dance band, a decision that worked out reasonably well. His memorabilia fill a museum on campus. John Stockton enrolled in nineteen eighty and became one of the greatest point guards in NBA history, holding career records for assists and steals when he retired. His Utah Jazz draft in nineteen eighty-four put Gonzaga basketball on the national map for the first time.

That map got a great deal bigger under coach Mark Few, who took over in nineteen ninety-nine and has led the Bulldogs to the NCAA Tournament every single year since, including two national championship game appearances, in two thousand seventeen and two thousand twenty-one. For a school founded with seven students on a gravel lot, that is a remarkable run.