At one end of the court, the prime example of BC’s rediscovered dedication occurs as Athena Tomlinson smoothly jaunts between the baselines. A primary reservist on the team qualifying for last year’s Women’s Basketball Invitation Tournament, she now slices through the dribbling exercise as a blurry conduit for the team’s newfound image. Her seamless motion smoothly shifts between her hands before a stop and a shift between directions, and the smooth jazz drumbeat carries her across each end of the court with natural crossovers that don’t exist within any of her teammates.
She is quick and agile, but her vision understands what’s happening across the court’s full spectrum. She can nearly see, without looking, where her teammates are moving, and her runs envision the creativity associated with BC’s next offensive play. In the truest sense, Tomlinson’s unspoken and diminutive sightlines ready her for a leadership role that’s been readying for a public unveiling in Monday night’s opening game against Holy Cross.
“Our coaching staff talks about it all the time, how these ladies are fun to coach,” said head coach Joanna Bernabei-McNamee. “Even on days when the ball isn’t dropping or things aren’t going their way in practice, they’re all very wide-eyed and attentive, and they bring a breath of fresh air. As coaches, that’s all you can ask, for teams to continue to compete for you. Individual players don’t get frustrated. That’s been one of our things for growth this year, that when things go bad, basketball is an up-and-down game, and when things go bad, we can stick together and rely on what we know we’re good at.”
BC finished last season with the No. 49 scoring offense and a stable scoring defense that didn’t surrender a significant jump in its points allowed per game, but the offseason exodus of the team’s top six to seven options left a top-third team without the majority of its primary options. The numbers are therefore useless in comparing the Eagles to a Holy Cross team that narrowly scraped north of 60 points per game while holding opponents to a 57.4 points per game mark that was five points shy of nation-leading Connecticut.
The Eagles finished last season in the top third of the country’s three-point shooting rosters, and they scored just under 20 percent of their entire offense by getting to the free throw line while the defense remained in Division I’s top tier against the two-point and three-point shot, but Tomlinson held responsibility for less than 10 percent of any of those numbers. She didn’t start more than four of her 33 appearances for the BC team that advanced to the WBIT, and she didn’t even qualify for stat tracking on her three pointers and free throws.
Yet watching this team left the indelible image of a West Coast point guard who flew under the radar as one of the Atlantic Coast Conference’s budding raw talents. A player with a 23 percent assist rate and a 45 percent three-point points rate was, in many ways, a darling for the analytics crowd, and the idea of improving her play while adding more minutes and more opportunities for advancement left open the juicy possibility for immediate sparks at both ends of the floor.
“Basketball is really up-and-down,” admitted Tomlinson, “so if we can stay on the upside, I can do my job of making sure that my team feels the energy and the belief that we have in one another – and that our coaches have in us every second that we’re on the court. I think I can really bring that [to the team] this year.”
As the only returning BC player with game experience on last year’s team, she’s now the conduit between the program’s generations. It’s different, at least in the sense that Tomlinson isn’t the same type of floor general as immediate predecessor Kaylah Ivey or distant lead point guard Marnelle Garraud, but it’s further distinguished by an attitude that’s entirely her own.
She is, at heart, a point guard conducting the offense between both ends of the court, but the California product holds a laid-back funk entirely different from those past leaders. There’s a grittiness that’s edgy and completely separated from the previous two tournament teams, but it’s wrapped in a competitiveness that’s now pulling a roster more loaded with recruits from the historic proving grounds of Virginia’s DMV district and the further and more distant Australian international tidewaters.
“We have a little bit of West Coast swag in California,” she explained. “I can bring that [to the game] with my ball handling. My energy is what I bring, every day, to practice. [Last year] was a great experience, and being able to get a feel for college basketball and the ACC gives me an opportunity to be one of the leaders and a little bit of a veteran who’s been here before. I’ve seen these teams and known we can hang.”
Those previous performances included a season-high 10 points in last year’s 81-55 win over Holy Cross. Playing 20 minutes for the second straight game and the third time in BC’s first seven matchups, she produced three assists for the third straight game and kept a defensive streak further alive with at least one steal in all except one of her first times on the college court. She grabbed a rebound for the third time and shot 2-for-4 from beyond the arc while hitting double figures offensively for the first – and only – time during the 2024-2025 season.
Less than four months later, she stepped onto the court for the WBIT matchup against Villanova with that same intent, and she produced her first 30-minute game with seven points, two assists, two steals and five rebounds. As the offense reconfigured around her in the offseason, the player that was entrusted for a near-upset in a postseason tournament found her way onto center stage as she answered the bell rung by a coaching staff seeking a cornerstone presence for its new concept.
“We have a whole new roster,” said Bernabei-McNamee, “and we’re changing a little bit of our scheming. We didn’t have size last year, but we have maybe even less size this year. We have really good shooters this year, so we’re working on developing an offense where the ball is shared faster, and we’re looking to pass up good shots for great shots. Everybody has to stay shot-ready, and we’ll probably put up a little bit more in threes than we have in the past.”
