Cortland, NY — The State University of New York Athletic Conference (SUNYAC) announced Wednesday the winners of the winter SUNYAC Scholar Athlete of the Year award, and fittingly, one of the brightest players to suit up for the Hawks, Marion Dietz, was named as the women's basketball recipient.
 
The SUNYAC Scholar Athlete of the Year award is given to an individual in each respective sport who has shown both academic and athletic excellence. Recipients must carry at least a 3.30 GPA and be a starter or significant reserve player. Dietz, not only excelled in the classroom, but also led the State University of New York at New Paltz on the court as well. She joined four fellow Hawks (Carly Croteau/field hockey, Cassandra Williams/women's cross country, Kevin Doorley/men's soccer and Laura Koob/tennis) who were honored with the award this year in their respective sport.
 
Dietz, who is pursuing a degree in Education, earned her name on the Dean's List every semester she's been at SUNY New Paltz, along with landing on the SUNYAC Commissioner's Honor Roll List multiple times and was enshrined in the Chi Alpha Sigma National Honor Society for the second-straight year in 2020. Her I.Q. translated over to the court where she utilized her smart play to become one of the most well rounded players to play for the program. 
"It makes a lot of sense I guess because she was the smartest player we ever had, but it doesn't always go together that way. In this case it did," said Hawks coach Jamie Seward. "She could do so much of everything. The kind of things we could do on offense and defense over the course of her entire career, really were taking advantage of certain players strengths wouldn't have been possible if you couldn't slide Marion over to take up something else that might have been missing because we were doing something unconventional with a different player that they could do really well."
 
Dietz led the team in scoring this past season with 393 points, averaging about 14 per game. She was later named Second-Team All-SUNYAC, while also collecting a spot on the SUNYAC All-Tournament team following the Hawks' second-straight SUNYAC title. Prior to helping her team hoist another conference trophy, she was honored with the SUNYAC Elite 20 Award, which is modeled after the NCAA ELITE 90 program that recognizes the "true essence of the student-athlete," by honoring an individual who reached the pinnacle of competition at the conference championship level in their sport, while also achieving the highest academic standard among their peers.
 
Seward explained Dietz's aptitude to understand what was in front of her, studying the opposition meticulously to know what kind of tendencies they have, and her ability to take advantage of those instances she saw on film.
 
"I've been a coach for 14 years now and I know I've never had a player who had that kind of understanding of the game in that way," Seward said. "It all goes along with her understanding of the game, but her ability to play so many different positions and so many different roles on offense and defense."
 
But arguably her best trait came on defense, able to play in multiple spots and shut down the oppositions best backcourt player. She went up against three players who were named All-American in 2020, including D3Hoops.com Player of the Year and WBCA First-Team All-American selection Erica DeCandido from Tufts, as well as SUNY Cortland's Beth Bonin and Buffalo State's Liv LeBaron. In three matchups against Bonin, Dietz contained the WBCA and D3Hoops All-American to an average of 14 points per game, including holding the senior guard to just eight points in the SUNYAC Championship game, well below her season average of nearly 19 points a contest. Bonin also shot a miniscule 16 percent (3-19) from 3-point range in those matchups, compared to nearly 37 percent during the season.  
Dietz also had LeBaron's number in all three matchups this season, as she held the conference's leading scorer to 10 points or less in all three games, including to just nine points in the team's regular season finale and in the conference semifinal game. LeBaron went into that playoff matchup boasting averages of 21.7 points, 42.3 percent shooting from the field and 34.6 percent from 3 per game. Dietz held her to a total of 38 points, 28 percent from the floor and 0-for-8 from the perimeter.
 
DeCandido, meanwhile, finished the season averaging 16.7 points per game, while shooting nearly 52 percent from the floor and she ended the outing against SUNY New Paltz with just eight points, going 4-for-12 from the field in 30 minutes of action — again a testament to Dietz's defense.
 
"Her greatest attribute was her brain and her preparation," Seward said. "Her will to put in the time to prepare and her brain to be able to process it and figure it out, and then take it out on the court and do it. She made it really difficult to do what they did well. There was a boxer 10-15 years ago, who was a pretty average boxer, but he beat a couple all-time greats. I remember him saying after a fight that 'I'm not the best, but I beat the best,' and feel like that's Marion. Go look at the list of All-American's this year and I believe she held all of them to somewhere near their career-low, or well-below career average of [three] players on the All-American list. That's pretty impressive."
 
Her role as a coach on the floor became even more pivotal this season with the Hawks bringing in eight freshmen, two of which made their way into the starting lineup with three more seeing extended time in the rotation. Dietz took it upon herself to help her teammates along, explaining what she saw on the court and made sure they knew what they were doing on every possession.  
"Marion also being a great teacher and what's going to make her a great coach is that she is an excellent teacher," Seward said. "She took responsibility of those freshmen's knowledge and understanding of the game and terminology and what we were trying to accomplish on the court. So if they didn't know something it would bother her, and she took responsibility for it. She would be the one apologizing to me, not the person who made the mistake. She felt it was her responsibility to teach them and make them understand what was going on. It was really multiple levels of what allowed her to be a coach on the floor… a lot of things we did wouldn't have been possible without her understanding of the game."
 
Dietz leaves as one of the most decorated players to play in the program. She became just the third Hawk to reach 1,000-career points and leaves second all-time on that list with 1,253. Additionally, she sits fifth all-time in single season points following her performance this past year and is tied for sixth and eighth most in single-game points, scoring 29 and 27 against RIT and the Red Dragons, respectively, this season. She is also a three-time SUNYAC Champion, playing in eight NCAA games with two appearances in the NCAA Sweet 16 and she, along with her four senior teammates, Philesha Teape, Maddie Van Pelt and Paige Niemeyer, are the winningest players in program history with 87 total victories.
 
Among all else though, Seward and his staff will miss Dietz's preparation and reliability every time she stepped on the floor.
 
"Marion is just so steady, so reliable. And she had some great games over the course of her career, but whether it was scoring 27 or 29 whatever her career-high was or whether she had a 1-for-10 night, you knew what you were going to get in every other aspect of the game," Seward said. "That's hard to do as a player and it's something that is really meaningful and valuable to me as a coach, because it didn't matter if Marion was struggling to shoot the ball. You know she was going to defend, you know she was going to be in place out there to help out other people and make sure they were doing the right things. That reliability and that steadiness — we all want something to rely on in life and that was what Marion was."

To view the full press release from SUNYAC, click here.

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