Congratulations,Niki Tsiotos

Well, we’ve been writing about Niki Tsiotos for years and about how she is not only one of the premier defensive basketball players in Massachusetts, but also one of the best all-around athletic guards in the state. Dowling College, an excellent school located in Long Island, N.Y., affirmed Tsiotos’s skill and potential by granting her a scholarship to play basketball in its highly successful Division 2 program.

Niki Tsiotos is a role model for young girls in Winthrop. She developed a love of sports — especially basketball — at a young age and practiced long hours to improve her skills — and now she has received the honor of playing the game at the next level.

We believe that, like her cousin, Dino Mallios, who became the nation’s premier playmaker at St. Anselm College, Niki has found the perfect school to maximize her collegiate basketball experience and help her team win games.

We can only imagine how proud her parents, Angela and Chris Tsiotos (the WHS hoop legend who averaged 28 points per game and played pro basketball in Greece) must be of their twin daughters, Niki and Poli, who is an outstanding soccer goalkeeper who will attend the University of New Hampshire.

We made it a point to take a look over at Chris Tsiotos as he watched his two daughters play the final game of their basketball careers on the famed parquet floor at the TD Garden. It was a great day and a great way for the Tsiotos twins to end their careers — and we knew the winner of that game with Archbishop Williams was clearly going to win the state championship.

Thank you, Niki, for being a top-notch student-athlete, and we’ll be following your college basketball career at Dowling.