BY BRIAN FEESSouthern Tier Sports Report
For Horseheads graduate Sophia Bonnell this past college basketball season was a bit of a dream come true.
All her life she imagined playing Division I basketball and this year she got the opportunity for LeMoyne.
“It’s really special,” Bonnell said. “It’s always been one of my dreams for a really long time, so to be able to be a part of something like that is really cool.”
Bonnell played her first year at D3 SUNY New Paltz. However, when the chance to transfer to LeMoyne came up, she took the opportunity.
“It was always a dream for a really long time so last spring when I was talking about transferring and this came up I thought this would be really cool, and here we are.”
Right from the start this year Bonnell got a taste of what big-time college basketball was like when she played six minutes at Baylor for her first NCAA appearance.
“That was when it kind of kicked in for me,” Bonnell said. “We walked in for practice the day before and I was like, woah, this is kind of like a thing now.”
Bonnell also started a pair of games in late January against LIU and at Stonehill. She played 34 minutes between those two games.
“It was really cool, it was kind of unexpected honestly,” Bonnell said. “Then, my coach came up to me and talked to me about it and said, ‘hey, you are going to start the next two games, just do what you’ve been doing and we’ll be all good,’ and that was that.”
Bonnell had played well earlier in the year against LIU, with a career-best five rebounds, tying her career-best with two assists and adding a steal in 14 minutes. That helped lead to her chance to start those games.
“I had a couple good games, I had a couple good practices, we had a couple injuries so it was kind of a combination of a bunch of different things,” Bonnell said. “We had played LIU a couple weeks before and he (coach) had really liked that game (by Bonnell) and then we had a couple people go down during that and I just kind of stepped up and he just said, ‘hey, I think you are the best fit for the game.’”
Starting a couple games and playing over 100 minutes on the season helps add confidence for Bonnell.
“It definitely builds my confidence a little bit,” Bonnell said. “We have a good group coming back net year as well. We return most of our team, we lose 1-2, so it will definitely be competitive next year and we’ll see how it goes.”
For the Horseheads graduate it was special that she came into LeMoyne from a D3 program and was given opportunities to play right away.
“Everybody is treated pretty much equally here,” Bonnell said. “We all just want to play basketball, we all want to win and next year hopefully get that NEC title and be playing in March.”
This year Bonnell watched her younger sister Samantha lead Horseheads to the state final four, and play into March, and she would like to be playing in March herself next year.
“We have talked about it,” Bonnell said. “We are really excited going into next year and hopefully we’ll be playing into March Madness.”
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PHOTO COURTESY OF LEMOYNE ATHLETICS.
