It's Familiar Foe St. Bona's Next For Marist Women

For the Marist women's basketball team, it's a rematch with St. Bonaventure in the second round of the NCAA Tournament Tuesday night.

The Bonnies needed a 16-5 run at the end of regulation to force overtime and, then, they pulled away in the extra session for a 72-65 victory over Florida Gulf Coast in its first-round game Sunday.

This is the first-ever appearance for the Bonnies in the NCAA event in the best season in the program's history. St. Bona's, its bracket's No. 5 seeed, is now 30-3 overall.

The two teams certainly should be familiar with each other.

St. Bona's knocked off Marist, 67-56, at the Reilly Center in Olean, N.Y., on Dec. 18, pulling away from a 48-48 tie with eight minutes left with a 7-0 run that put the Red Foxes away.

And, the Bonnies nipped Marist two years ago, 45-40, at the McCann Center in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. That accounted for just one of Marist's losses in a 31-3 finish for the 2010-11 season.

St. Bonaventure is a veteran team with three senior starters. Two of them, 6-1 forward Megan VanTatenhove; and 5-10 guard Amanda Horton, led the team in scoring against FGCU Sunday with 18 and 17 points, respectively.

The Bonnies' leading scorer, 5-8 senior guard Jessica Jenkins averages 14.3 points per game, but only scored five in the opening-round game of the NCAA event.

Marist has won five NCAA tournament games in the past six season, including two in 2007.

"I think it's tremendous," said Marist coach Brian Giorgis, on the Marist website after Sunday's victory about his team's consistent success in the national championship event. "Like anything ... doing it once was nice, and doing it a few times, but this is five wins and having people say that this isn't a surprise, that's just tremendous. It's a feather in our cap and it's a feather in our community who comes out and supports us all the time."