The Marist women’s basketball team will make the trip across the Atlantic Ocean to play in the MAAC-Atlantic Sun Challenge November 18 and 19 at the National Basketball Arena in Dublin, Ireland.
Marist College athletic director Tim Murray confirmed the news in an interview with Center Field on Tuesday.
“We’ll be in Dublin with the women in November,” Murray said during the conversation.
For the 2021 edition, the schedule and list of teams was officially announced only a few months before the event in September. While the MAAC and Atlantic Sun have not made an official statement, Irish travel website Cara, which works with Inspirus Sports, a partner of the event, has seven of the eight teams listed online.
The Rider women’s team and the Niagara men’s team are slated to join Marist in Dublin with the other MAAC men’s team yet to be announced. The website did not distinguish gender with the Atlantic Sun teams, but Stetson, Central Arkansas, North Florida, and Eastern Kentucky will make up the other side of the field.
The women’s team will join the men’s basketball squad in going abroad in the fall. The men are scheduled to play in the first ever Basketball Hall of Fame London Showcase at the O2 Arena in England’s capital city.
The women last competed in the MAAC-ASUN Challenge in the fall of 2019, besting North Florida and Lipscomb in Kissimmee, Florida. The last time one of Brian Giorgis’s squads went abroad was during the 2012-13 season, when the Red Foxes played in the Virgin Islands, losing two out of three games, including a lopsided defeat to UConn.
The last time the Marist men went outside the US to play also involved the Emerald Isle, as the Red Foxes played in Belfast, Northern Ireland, winning two games in November 2018.
The MAAC-ASUN Challenge features eight teams (four men’s and four women’s) and is equally divided among conference lines.
Last season, the event was held at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in Orlando, with both Manhattan teams, the Iona men, and the Fairfield representing the MAAC.
In the announcement for the event, the conferences said that the challenge will only be held overseas in 2022 before returning stateside for future editions.
Photo from the MAAC
