Coaches don’t typically get to enjoy their accomplishments as they’re happening.
Win a big game? There’s always something that needs to be fixed, which unfailingly takes priority over the thousand other things that went right. Earn a championship? The tournament starts in a matter of days. Voted conference coach of the year? Throw that plaque on the wing next time out and see how that goes. Complete a successful season? It’s time to recruit, both internally and externally.
Chris Kielsmeier, after his Cleveland State team defeated Northern Kentucky 88-78 in a Horizon League quarterfinal game on Thursday night in the Wolstein Center, managed to shed those blinders for a few minutes while holding court in the massive arena’s underbelly.
Kielsmeier mentioned the CSU men’s squad, which simultaneously won its own quarterfinal contest at Youngstown State. He thanked the assembled media members for covering the Vikings all season long. He reflected on the current state of college sports for a bit, as well as the recruitments of two of his star players, starting guards Colbi Maples and Mickayla Perdue. He then turned his attention to his staff, as well as to university president Laura Bloomberg, “probably the president that loves women’s basketball more than anybody in the country.”
“We have amazing people at Cleveland State,” Kielsmeier said, building into a Howard Dean-like crescendo. “I love Cleveland State and I love everybody!”
If it came off a bit like a victory lap, he could hardly be blamed. After all, CSU is headed to Indianapolis for the Horizon League semifinals for the fifth year in a row. Green Bay has the second longest active streak in that regard, three, though the longtime conference juggernaut’s last miss was delivered by the Vikings in the 2020-21 quarterfinal round.
What’s more, Cleveland State holds the two most recent titles awarded by the HL, thanks to last season’s league tournament and this year’s freshly-earned regular season crown.
For a program that always feels like it’s chasing Green Bay despite those accomplishments – even now, most of the high-profile national pundits who don’t really watch the Horizon League expect the Phoenix to emerge victorious at the conference’s final four next week – Thursday felt like something of a validation of CSU’s status as a top mid-major program.
Of course, to enjoy those fleeting moments following the Vikings’ 28th win of the season, Kielsmeier and company had to put away a tough Northern Kentucky team for the second time in five days.
A close game through the early stages of the evening pivoted late in the first quarter when NKU’s Kailee Davis picked up her second foul and had to sit on the bench for an extended spell, with the latter foul contributing to a Jordana Reisma and-one play that tied the game at 13. A short while later, Perdue buried a pair of three-pointers 47 seconds apart that gave CSU the lead for good at 21-17 in the final minute of the opening period.
That was prelude to a 30-point second-quarter Vikings explosion that helped the home team take a 52-31 lead into the locker room. Maples, as is customary for the Horizon League’s Player of the Year, was a major driver of a 20-3 run that began with the late-first-quarter push, scoring eight of her 20 first-half points during the spurt. Maples finished the contest with game highs of 31 tallies and five assists, while her running mate, Perdue, wound up with 24 points (including six three-pointers) and four assists.
“They’re straight hoopers,” Kielsmeier said. “They’re just straight ballers. They live in the gym, they want this, they’re living their dream right now. And they’re as appreciative of the opportunities that they get as anyone in the country.”
“They just love the game.”
Reisma added 15 tough points to the winning effort, and Sara Guerreiro chipped in ten, with seven rebounds. Collectively, the Vikings shot 58.8 percent for the game, including 11-for-23 from three-point range, on the way to their second highest point total against a conference foe this season.
Cleveland State also had a fair amount of success defending Norse centerpiece Carter McCray, the HL’s newest Freshman of the Year, during the opening half. McCray had eight points and six rebounds at the break, good totals to be sure, but manageable from the opposition’s point of view.
That outcome exacted a steep price though. Thanks to CSU’s aggression on McCray, the Vikings’ post players ran up a severe amount of foul trouble. By the first couple minutes of the third quarter, Brooklynn Fort-Davis was whistled for four fouls, while Reisma had picked up her third. Paulina Hernandez made a cameo and was called twice in just 1:28 of action. Faith Burch, the other player on Kielsmeier’s roster with the tools to defend McCray, landed awkwardly while fighting for a rebound and briefly appeared to be injured before returning a couple minutes later.
“If you look at the fouls that were called on our bigs, I’d like to watch the tape on some of them,” Kielsmeier said. “There was a lot to me that was pretty soft.”
“Us fouling slowed everything down,” Perdue said. “It slowed our transition down, just fouling on rebounds so we couldn’t get clean rebounds and start our transition, that’s our game. If we don’t have that, then everything’s just slower-paced and we’re used to playing fast.”
Suddenly, McCray found herself with tons more space to operate, and her 21 second-half points (the rookie finished with a career-high 29, alongside 14 rebounds) helped power a Norse comeback effort. With McCray demanding attention on the inside, NKU’s perimeter game opened up as well. A Davis three chopped the CSU lead back into single digits early in the fourth quarter, while a Noelle Hubert triple made the score 74-68 Vikings with 5:46 to play.
“Nothing’s secure this time of year,” Kielsmeier said. “[NKU] hit tough shots, and we left them open on that perimeter way too much. For them to go 12-for-23 and also beat us up on the inside is not Cleveland State defense.”
“I think maybe everyone was a little tense,” Perdue offered. “We want to win so badly that we’re forgetting the little things, so we just needed to calm down. We know that we have to get the win at the end of the day, and in order to do that, we have to execute everything that much better. Everything just had to be sharp, and we knew that.”
Maples responded to the gut check with one of the biggest plays of the game. After taking a short pass from Reisma just above the free throw line, the Grambling transfer drove off the left wing and bounced home a layup while drawing a fourth foul to McCray. The point guard converted the subsequent free throw to put her team back up by nine.
“Everything always rises at tournament time,” Maples said. “When I saw a lane, it was just like clear as day, just go for it. That’s the only thing I was thinking.”
The Vikings managed to hold things to a stalemate from that point on, largely on the free throw line, to lock down their ticket to Indy. CSU will take on fourth-seeded Wright State in Monday’s first semifinal, prior to a clash between Green Bay and Purdue Fort Wayne on the other side of the bracket.
“We got it done, and we’re going to Indy and playing in the conference tournament semifinals for the fifth year in a row,” Kielsmeier stated. “How many programs in the country haven’t done that one time in the last five years? The list of teams that have [made five straight trips] is pretty small and really the elite of the elite, and that’s what this program is.”
