(Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series centering on Bona athletic director Tim Kenney’s recent conference call with season ticket holders. Today: His summation of the 2019-20 season)
ST. BONAVENTURE, N.Y. — Tim Kenney felt compelled to be part of the solution.
The St. Bonaventure athletic director was standing in the lobby of a Brooklyn hotel in the early afternoon of March 12 when the chaos that had been bubbling just below the surface began to envelop the college basketball world.
Just before Bona was set to depart for the Barclays Center and its Atlantic 10 Tournament matchup with George Mason, the noon game between UMass and VCU was halted before it began.
Within a matter of minutes, almost every major conference had canceled its postseason event. By the time he’d gotten off the elevator, a commotion within his own league had begun to occur.
And when he looked into some of his players’ eyes, he knew: The A-10 had no choice but to be next.
“How it all went down, it was crazy,” Kenney said. “(Coach Mark) Schmidt’s asking me, ‘Why are we even doing this?’ And I’m sitting there trying to give him an answer, and I didn’t have one. And then (Mason coach Dave) Paulsen comes out of the elevator and says, ‘TK, what the heck are we doing?’
“Then Osun (Osunniyi, a Bona sophomore) grabbed me and said, ‘I’m scared,’ and I’m like, alright. I said, ‘Let me go handle this, we’ve got to put an end to this; this is silly.’ Cooler heads prevailed, and we did the right thing.”
KENNEY was one of a handful of program officials, including Schmidt, to address season ticket holders in a Zoom video call in late April.
The fifth-year AD touched on an array of subjects, including his summation of the 2019-20 season, that infamous afternoon in Brooklyn and what, in his eyes, makes the current Bona roster so special.
He described last winter as a “tale of three seasons”: The beginning, when Bona was down two starters due to injury; the middle, when it got healthy, and the end — the conference campaign.
And though Bona, for a second-straight year, got off to a nightmarish start due to those injuries, he was confident that Schmidt’s team would turn its season around, the same way it did in 2018-19.
“What people didn’t realize was … obviously, they knew Osun being out (was problematic), but they didn’t realize what Jaren (English, who missed the first five games with a broken hand) brought to the table. And I think that was important, that we knew what he was going to bring.
“It was not easy (taking a hit) in a couple of those games because nobody likes to lose. But we always kept saying, keep the faith, when we get healthy, we’ll start doing it, and that’s kind of what happened there.”
THE BONNIES came within one victory of another 20-win season, and would have certainly gotten there — and then some — had Osunniyi and English not missed nearly all of November …
Or if they had actually gotten to play in the A-10 Tournament.
Perhaps most notably, they forged this latest successful season with one of the youngest rosters in Division I — and a starting lineup that primarily consisted of four sophomores and a freshman.
Along the way, they endeared themselves to the Bona faithful, leading to an average home attendance, Kenney said, of over 4,300 fans — the highest in the Reilly Center since 2002. They not only set the table for a strong 2021 and ‘22 campaign, but also displayed a kind of closeness, both Kenney and Schmidt attested, that can help turn a good team into a great one.
“We have a really good group of kids,” Kenney said. “There’s a core group there that gets St. Bonaventure and they get what this is all about, and you don’t have to try to manufacture fake ‘rah-rah.’”
He added: “I think a lot of times, they all rally with each other, and it makes it a little bit easier to a point — I’m never going to say coaching is easy, because look at Mark; he’s dealing with 18-22-year-olds. But I think what we have is this core that gives you such optimism every game that you play.
“That’s what I’m really looking at from my vantage point knowing the kids. But you see … they’ve got a chance in every single game. Sometimes (we’ve come up short), but I’m proud of these guys.”
INJURIES (and preseason fan optimism) aside, Bona knew that 2019-20 was going to be another “growing year.”
Even after reaching the A-10 championship game the year before, it was still tremendously young this season. It was also in a much better league from top to bottom, one that returned virtually all of its top talent and boasted one of the best teams in league history: Dayton.
Given those factors — not to mention the sort of universal belief that it wasn’t so much about this season as it is the next two — Kenney was pleased with how this season ultimately played out.
“It wasn’t one of those where we just thought we were going to play into an automatic berth in the NCAA Tournament,” he said. “We knew it wasn’t going to be that. We were pretty much on par with where we thought we would be.
“We finished fifth in the conference, that’s perfect. We’ve always said, if we stay consistently — which we always have — in the top half of the conference, that gives us an opportunity to win it. If you’re up there, you have that chance, and I think that’s really what this shows: We got there, we got to fifth, and who knows what would have happened in Brooklyn? We could have just taken right off.”
He added: “Yes, it got cut a little early, but it also sets the stage for going forward for next year and having a really good season.”
(J.P. Butler, Bradford Publishing Company group sports editor, can be reached at jbutler@oleantimesherald.com)
