Cleveland State clinches program’s first Horizon League regular season championship

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Photo: Cleveland State Athletics

“I’m soaked,” Chris Kielsmeier announced as he plopped into a chair behind the table for his postgame press conference, with a freshly chopped-up net draped around his neck.

Cleveland State’s head coach, an apparent victim of the locker room water fights that follow any basketball team’s accomplishments, could hardly be blamed for not noticing his condition until that moment. After all, he and the Vikings had just entered uncharted territory following an 81-69 victory over Northern Kentucky on Saturday afternoon to secure CSU’s first regular season conference championship in 51 years of program history.

What’s more, thanks to Green Bay’s loss to Milwaukee – a game which ended moments after the Vikings-Norse affair and drew a collective yell from the home bench as the result was shared – the Vikings surprisingly finished 2023-24 alone atop the Horizon League standings.

“It makes it more significant, let’s not say it doesn’t,” Kielsmeier admitted, after indulging his urge to scoreboard watch a bit. “It’s ours outright, and there’s only one banner in the country that’s going to say ‘2024 Horizon League Regular Season Champs.’”

“It’s a distinction that you know is yours and nobody else’s. We’ll get really cool big rings that define this journey, and know that that journey was ours.”

As he often does in moments important enough to ignore a saturated t-shirt, particularly one that reads “champions” across the front, Kielsmeier quickly became philosophical and considered the broader arc of his team’s latest achievement.

“Our program over the last six years has just continuously elevated every step of the way, and this was just the culmination of six years of hard work,” he said. “We got it done today, but we had to build the six years ago to get to the point where we could even talk about this being realistic. It’s a special day for our players, and a day we’ll remember for the rest of our lives.”

“How many times in life do you get to wake up in the morning and do something that’s never been done before, by anybody? There’s been a lot of people who have had the opportunity to do this, it’s really, really hard to do.”

Kielsmeier would know. As he pointed out last season following CSU’s Horizon League Tournament championship, the Vikings had to make four separate trips to Indianapolis for the HL’s final four during his tenure before enjoying a visit that ended well, including a crushing loss to IUPUI in the 2022 championship game.

That disappointment, and its successful follow-up, parallels a previous close call for the regular season title.

On February 23, 2023, Cleveland State faced a game at Green Bay that turned out to be a de facto Horizon League regular season championship clash. The Vikings faltered that evening by a 64-49 score, and had to watch UWGB celebrate its 22nd HL season crown two days later.

“Sometimes when you’ve done something for the first time, it just doesn’t happen, no matter how much you want it to happen,” Kielsmeier said. “I just think it goes back to how you build the program. Does today happen if we didn’t get that close last year? Maybe, maybe not.”

Given a second opportunity at things one year and one week later, however, the Vikings left nothing to chance.

Mickayla Perdue – who remembers nothing of the fateful 2022-23 game at Green Bay, since she was playing at Glenville State at the time – paced the Vikings with 25 points, shaking off a rough start that saw her miss two shots on CSU’s opening possession of the game.

“Micky had one of her roughest starts to a game probably all year, she wasn’t settled in early in the game at all,” Kielsmeier said. “We scripted a play for Micky at the beginning and hoped that she would hit it and be able to say ‘okay, the ball’s going to go in tonight, let’s take off.’”

She would rarely miss after that early setback, hitting nine of her final 12 shot attempts, including five three-pointers. Her resurgence helped the Vikings produce a substantial amount of separation from NKU during the second and third quarters, on the way to a lead that peaked at 21 points early in the fourth period.

“[Micky] hasn’t had a lot of games where she really struggled that first quarter, and worked herself out of it and was the best player on the floor,” Kielsmeier said. “She hit a lot of tough shots, and made some moments and plays when the shot clock was running down. She had a phenomenal game tonight, but we had multiple players who had really big performances.”

A couple of those big performances came from Sara Guerreiro, who scored 18 points and pulled in a game-high ten rebounds, while adding four assists, and Colbi Maples, who similarly tallied 18 points alongside four helpers.

Northern Kentucky was led by freshman center Carter McCray, an Oberlin, OH native who finished with a game-high 27 points and was virtually an automatic bucket when the Norse managed to get the ball to her down low.

“They’re going in there, and she’s a heck of a player,” Kielsmeier said. “The sky’s the limit for her ability, on both ends of the floor. She can impact the game in a variety of ways.”

With their conference title and the top seed in the upcoming Horizon League tournament in hand, Cleveland State will next play a quarterfinal game at the Wolstein Center on Thursday evening. Their opponent in that contest will be determined by the results of Tuesday’s first-round games.

The Vikings, of course, will try to add three more victories to their current total of 27 beginning next week, the requirement to repeat as HL tournament champions and secure another trip to the NCAA Tournament.

“The last thing that I just said to the locker room when I left was ‘let’s not make this the highlight of the year. Let’s make what is to come even more special,’” Kielsmeier said.

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