By Tyler Diedrich
Editor-in-Chief
We can now resume our regularly scheduled lives, but what a month – what a year we’ve experienced at St. Bonaventure.
Bonnies basketball fans had high expectations entering the 2011-12 season, and it’s fair to say the teams met them – in exhilarating fashion. It didn’t quite have a fairytale ending, but the glass slipper stayed on Bonaventure’s collective feet longer than many believed it would.
Driving back from watching the men improbably win the Atlantic 10 Championship in Atlantic City March 11, fellow editor Bryan Jackson and I, both seniors, agreed we finally got the big-time college experience we hoped for upon enrolling in a school with NCAA Division I athletics nearly four years ago. That conversation was before road trips to Nashville and Raleigh for the men’s and women’s Big Dances, respectively.
Now, with the ride over, it’s time to put everything into perspective.
The basketball teams finished a combined 51-16, easily the best single-season total in school history. Both teams made the NCAA Tournament in the same year for the first time in school history – the women’s appearance being their first ever.
Three years ago, the campus buzzed about basketball more than any other previous time during the post-scandal years as the women ran to the quarterfinals of the second-tier Women’s National Invitation Tournament (WNIT). This year’s run made peanuts out of 2008-09.
The electricity of 2011-12 has never happened before and may never happen again. For Bonaventure seniors, the season was nearly a perfect way to go out. For freshmen, it was a breathtaking experience they shouldn’t take for granted.
The debate now becomes ‘Which team had the more impressive season?’
The women went undefeated in the A-10 regular season and nearly made a clean sweep before falling in the conference final to Dayton. They recovered from the loss to win two NCAA Tournament games, though.
The men had a good-but-not-great regular season but weren’t even receiving NCAA Tournament bubble consideration prior to A-10s.
However, they won when it mattered most and earned an automatic NCAA bid. Then they fell just short of a colossal upset of No. 3 seed Florida State. As heartbreaking as that loss in Nashville may have been, the men can always fall back on the fact they won a
championship. They were the best in the A-10, and that can never be taken away or topped, only duplicated.
We’ll let history decide which team achieved more, but through every thunder dunk and clutch three-pointer, the 2011-12 Bonnies basketball teams didn’t define their legacies; rather, they created new ones.
No one knows whether or not this will usher in a glorious new era of Bonaventure basketball, but there’s no question this tiny Franciscan school in the middle of nowhere in Western New York is back on the map.
The proof will be in the new banners hanging from the Reilly Center rafters this fall and beyond.
Thanks for an unforgettable ride, Bonnies.
diedrits@bonaventure.edu
