ST. BONAVENTURE, N.Y. – It’s one of the enduring photos from the St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team’s forever win over Xavier in the 2012 Atlantic 10 Tournament Championship in Atlantic City.
In it, coach Mark Schmidt, standing tall on a ladder, is smiling ear to ear, holding the freshly cut net high above his head with his left hand while the “2012 Champions” placard rests against the backboard behind his right shoulder.
Schmidt, undoubtedly, remembers what it was like watching the final seconds tick off of his team’s 67-56 victory, raising that trophy and climbing that ladder. Exactly nine years (and one day) since guiding Bona to its first A-10 postseason crown, he wants his current team to have the same experience.
And the Bonnies want that too.
BEFORE THIS most unique season in program history even began, Bona had set the realistic goal of winning both the league’s regular season and tournament titles. For as much as this core has already accomplished — two championship game appearances, four tourney wins and a regular season title among them — this would easily be its most notable feat to date, the grandest of prizes for not only surviving, but succeeding, in a year of painstaking commitment to safety protocols.
But what if a second tournament title was almost … secondary in importance? What if winning it all wasn’t exactly necessary?
That’s the very unprecedented position that Bona finds itself entering Sunday’s title game rematch with VCU.
The Bonnies, by all accounts, have firmly played themselves into the Field of 68 regardless of what happens this weekend. As of Tuesday, they were the second-highest ranked No. 9 seed in the tournament, a good 10-12 spots above the cut line, according to ESPN’s Joe Lunardi.
Bona, a focused and ferocious team from the outset, will, of course, want another crack at the Rams, to rectify one of its few losses from the regular year. But will the knowledge that they’ll be dancing no matter the outcome allow it to, perhaps, play a little looser?
“I DON’T know if looser’s the word,” Schmidt said in a pre-championship press conference on Wednesday, before adding, “We’ve accomplished one goal, but the second goal is still out there. So our approach is, we want to be the best we can be from 1-3 p.m. on Sunday.
“We’re not worried about the NCAA Tournament. Our mentality is, let’s try to go win this thing and put our destiny in our hands and not worry about what happens in that room out in Indianapolis.
He added, “Once it’s over, then we’ll look ahead and see what’s going to happen, but right now we’re preparing to play the best we can and hopefully win our second A-10 Tournament championship in the school’s history. That’s our goal.”
For Bona and it’s fans it’s a weird, but welcomed, feeling.
The Bonnies woke up on Championship Sunday of 2012 and ‘19 with the pressure of knowing they had to win that afternoon or their season was over. In 2016 and ‘18, they were forced to sweat out the selection show, making for a stressful day before those fates were finalized — with an unceremonious snub in the former and a First Four date (and eventual win over UCLA) in the latter.
This year, there’s no such stress. That was eliminated last Saturday when Bona danced its way out of the Siegel Center with a 71-53 victory over Saint Louis in the A-10 Tournament semifinals.
Still, there remains more for this team to achieve.
Schmidt’s team can become the first since the Billikens in 2013 to win both league championships in the same year. It could jump to as high as a No. 7 seed — a seemingly unfathomable sentence even five years ago — with a win on Sunday. And that’s where its focus is leading up to the VCU rematch.
“WE’RE NOT really worried about the NCAA Tournament right now,” junior guard Jaren Holmes reiterated. “We haven’t worried about it since our name was in the conversation that we would be in the tournament. We haven’t focused on that.
“That’s ultimately an end-goal and one of the goals we set at the beginning of the year, but we’re not really worried about that, especially with (Sunday’s game) in front of us. We’re only focused on VCU and the A-10 championship.”
Nine years later, Schmidt, for the first time, will see what the other side was like in 2012. On that day, his close friend and counterpart, former Xavier coach Chris Mack, set out to lead his team to an A-10 title while simultaneously knowing it was in.
And Bona? Interestingly, it’s going to end Sunday on a high even if it comes up short of Part 2 of its preseason goal.
But that won’t change the way it approaches the Rams. This is how it’s been playing almost from the start.
“I wouldn’t use the word loose, because we always want to play loose,” Holmes said, agreeing with his coach. “When you’re loose, it’s easier for things to flow. So that’s one of our big emphases, is always play loose, have fun out there.
“We never want to be tight. When you’re tight, you’re trying not to lose, and when you play loose, you’re playing to win. We’re going out there to play loose and we’re going out there to play to win. That’s our goal.”
