When Sara Guerreiro jogs through a human tunnel and takes her usual place in Cleveland State’s starting lineup on Thursday for the Vikings’ Horizon League quarterfinal game, she will be taking the first steps towards continuing a rare accomplishment. Her teams – first at South Florida, and now at CSU – have qualified for the NCAA Tournament during each of her three completed seasons of college basketball.
Those squads also won three conference titles, including the Bulls’ 2020-21 regular season and tournament championships in the American Athletic Conference, as well as the Vikings’ Horizon League tournament victory last season.
Guerreiro, however, could hardly be blamed if she doesn’t feel quite as accomplished as that list sounds.
She saw extremely limited action as a freshman at USF in 2020-21, just 48 minutes across nine games, and none in the AAC or NCAA Tournaments. The following year brought a decent bump in playing time, including 27 of the Bulls’ 33 contests, though the guard from Seixal, Portugal rarely logged a significant stretch on the floor in any of those outings. Guerreiro played for just 3:36 of a first-round NCAA Tournament loss to Miami to close 2021-22.
Things picked up a bit after transferring to Cleveland State that summer, and she found a consistent role last season on an ascendant Vikings team trying to clear the final hurdles on the track to a banner ceremony. She was generally the second or third player off the bench and used mostly for defensive purposes, but Guerreiro nevertheless posted the first four double-digit scoring outings of her career.
Then came the worst break yet, and not in a figurative sense.
The day before Cleveland State was set to play Green Bay in the penultimate game on the schedule, a contest that essentially decided the Horizon League regular season championship, Guerreiro fractured her left hand while defending a practice player during the Vikings’ final tune-up.
“It was literally the practice before the game,” Guerreiro said. “Then we lost, and Green Bay got the regular season title.”
The team regrouped following that setback and went on to win three HL tournament games, including a rematch with the Phoenix in the final, before making the program’s third-ever NCAA Tournament appearance, at Villanova. Guerreiro remained with the team throughout that run, and continued to practice and warm up before games, indulging the faint hope that she could participate at some point, perhaps if CSU collected a pair of March Madness upsets and bought her hand another week to heal.
“I had a full thing on my hand, like a pad, so even catching the ball was weird,” she acknowledged. “I was practicing, but limited. I knew I probably wasn’t going to play – only if necessary.”
It wasn’t necessary, as things turned out, and Guerreiro was relegated to the role of supportive teammate during the culmination of Cleveland State’s 30-win season.
That experience, obviously, was bittersweet.
“I was really happy for them, but of course, inside of me, I was a little sad,” she said. “I didn’t feel like I was fully part of it. It hurt a little bit.”
Just about a year later, Guerreiro isn’t hurt, physically or emotionally, and she’s continually adding new peaks to what’s easily been the best season of her career.
Over the summer, Guerreiro competed with the Portuguese national team at the anachronistically-named 2021 World University Games (the event was postponed for two years due to COVID-19) in Chengdu, China. Though she and her squadmates finished ninth, that placement involved consecutive wins against Argentina, Romania and Slovakia in a consolation round to close out the tournament. The modest streak served as something of a springboard to Guerreiro’s second season at CSU, which saw her become an every-game starter who averages 27.4 minutes per game.
During that time on the floor, she’s proven to be just as dangerous on the offensive side of the ball as she is effective on defense. Against Niagara on December 6th, she established a new career high with 22 points, one piece of her 8.3 per-game scoring average. At 49.5 percent, Guerreiro’s shooting accuracy is a full 11 points higher than last season, and her 46.7 percent rate from three-point range ranks 16th of 2,248 eligible players nationally.
Furthermore, her 5.6 rebounds and 1.4 steals per game demonstrate that there’s been no regression elsewhere as those scoring numbers have exploded.
“Sara has worked hard since she arrived on our campus to better her game and understand how to fit it into our system,” Vikings head coach Chris Kielsmeier said. “She has improved constantly throughout her career at CSU and when we have needed her the most she has delivered on both ends of the floor.”
Last week, Guerreiro was named to the Horizon League’s 2023-24 All-Academic Team. The senior is a mechanical engineering major who carries a 3.88 grade point average – to reiterate, while receiving instruction in her second language – and has qualified for the Dean’s List following each semester that she’s spent in Northeast Ohio.
“In addition to her high level of play on the court, Sara is also an excellent example of what we want our players to be in the classroom,” Kielsmeier observed. “She puts just as much effort into being a champion in the classroom as she puts into being a champion on the court.”
As if all of that wasn’t enough, she even earned one of the rarest opportunities in sports: the ability to correct history, as least to the extent allowed by linear time. Given a second chance at a regular season championship clinching game on Saturday, Guerreiro managed to make it through a week of practice unscathed, then delivered one of the best games of her life against Northern Kentucky, including 18 points, ten rebounds and four assists as CSU secured a first-ever Horizon League season crown.
Next up for Guerreiro in her quest to live Jay Gatsby’s dream is active participation in a conference tournament championship. After that, there’s the matter of that 3:36 of playing time across three trips to the NCAA Tournament. It doesn’t take an engineer to figure out how to fix those things, of course, but Guerreiro believes that she and the Vikings are off to the right start.
“Right now, we’re so confident,” she said. “I’m confident, and the whole team is. We’re so together – that’s what Coach K said, we’re not going to make [the regular season championship] the highlight of our season.”
“It’s the beginning of something really, really great. And I think we can accomplish it.”
