There wasn’t a players-only meeting or group text.
There wasn’t a frenzied outreach effort from the coaching staff.
There wasn’t a singular inflection point, or a moment that affected the hearts and minds of student-athletes with seemingly the whole world in front of them, causing a group of people who certainly could have entertained other possibilities to return to Cleveland State for the 2024-25 season.
And Vikings head coach Chris Kielsmeier is perfectly fine with that. In fact, he thinks that’s the way it has to be, given the pace at which things proceed following the end of the postseason play, when players are permitted to enter the transfer portal almost immediately.
“There’s nothing you can do at that point,” he said of that hectic postseason cadence. “It needs to be what have you done the entire time they’ve been here, in terms of the culture that you’ve created and how much fun they’re having while learning and growing as a player and as a person.”
“When you recruit the right type of people, they want to get better, and they want to know that that’s happening. In our program, players that come here know that they’re going to have a lot of fun and know that they’re going to win. Our program motto is ‘stick together, work hard, have fun.’ That fuels us every year. You can always be surprised, there’s no doubt about that, but again, I think when you’ve created the right type of culture and environment, then you’re a lot more at peace with however it plays out.”
In the present version of college sports, with nearly all limits on player movement or compensation melted away through litigation, each student-athlete is essentially a free agent every offseason.
There’s an obvious dilemma in that reality, particularly for mid-major programs: If a team is bad or a coach moves on (whether by choice or not), it’s become routine for most of the roster to head somewhere else. If a team is good – as has been the case at Cleveland State in recent years – the top players often use that increased notoriety to leave anyway, whether it’s for NIL money or simply the opportunity to prove themselves on a bigger stage with a cleaner road to a national championship or a professional career.
Each offseason, the Horizon League loses a couple prominent players through that latter pathway, including a pair of former conference freshmen of the year this summer in Carter McCray and Brooke Quarles-Daniels, who left Northern Kentucky and Oakland for Big Ten schools. Last year, former postseason award recipients Rachel Kent, Phoenix Gedeon and Ivy Turner were among the headlining departures. One the HL’s recent powerhouses, Wright State, came unglued after their 2020-21 championship season, triggered by the departure of head coach Katrina Merriweather.
But outside of the graduate transfer departure of reserve forward Faith Burch, the current Vikings have survived intact this summer, even with the consistent pressure that success applies to any team’s foundation. That cohesion comes in spite of the fact that the roster now includes the two most recent conference players of the year, Destiny Leo and Colbi Maples, another player who easily could have won that award in place of Maples last year, all-league first-teamer Mickayla Perdue, and Jordana Reisma, who has also been honored by the HL through a few different avenues.
The statement is just as valid for the rest of the players on the squad, since it’s possible for anyone to find a reason to want out, no matter who they are or what their role on the team is. If there’s not an NIL bag waiting somewhere or a coach departure to trigger a portal avalanche, the classic motivations of playing time and compatibility always have the potential to drive someone away.
“If they wanted to stay, they could stay. If they wanted to go, they could go,” Reisma said, encapsulating the present climate in 16 words.
Even Kielsmeier, the reigning Horizon League coach of the year, certainly has the capital to eject at this point, after taking a previously-comatose CSU program to the third NCAA Tournament bid and first regular season conference title in program history over the last two years, his fifth and sixth in town.
Yet all are back. Why?
“I think every coach in college athletics for the rest of their careers will be worried about kids leaving. I don’t think there’s any way you can run from that,” Kielsmeier said. “However, I think if you’ve created the right culture, you’ve created the right type of environment where there’s clear growth and fun and success at the center of what you’re doing, then kids don’t want to leave. Not every kid in America is destined to be in the portal, and not every kid’s destined to be in the portal a second or a third time. It’s not scripted that way.”
“We mesh so well as a team,” Maples added. “This was probably one of the only teams I’ve been on where there hasn’t been a locker room issue, there wasn’t one problem that we had to overcome behind the scenes or whatever. We all understood each other, we all got along. So I think that’s what really got people to stay.”
Beyond the obvious benefits in the locker room and off the court, Cleveland State should see a performance bump from their continuity as well, particularly on defense. The Vikings, rather uniquely, play an aggressive 2-3 zone almost exclusively. There’s no deception, no large-scale tailoring to the personnel on the other sideline, it’s just a show of blunt force and blinding pace that dares opponents to figure out a way through.
When it’s executed well, a non-negotiable given its familiarity to the entire Horizon League, it’s close to unbeatable, while also fueling a disproportionate amount of CSU’s scoring, thanks to quick possession changes – “defend, rebound, run,” as Kielsmeier likes to say. When it’s not, it’s vulnerable in a couple places, particularly on the perimeter, as happened during a crucial regular season loss at Green Bay last year, causing Kielsmeier to quip that the Vikings had played his signature defense like a “high school zone” that evening.
“Our whole system is revolved around us being together, us being one and being a unit,” Reisma said. “And if one thing isn’t going right, we all work together to make sure that we can fix it.”
It’s worth pointing out that at the time of that defeat against the Phoenix, Cleveland State was roughly one month removed from Leo’s season-ending knee injury and effectively had no returning starters from the 2022-23 season at that point. Players like Reisma, Sara Guerreiro and Carmen Villalobos had played big minutes by then and were able to adapt quickly, but for the seven others then in their first season with the Vikings, it was very much a case of learning on the job during the schedule’s least-forgiving stretch. As Reisma observed, that situation potentially invited disaster.
The opposite may be true now, as CSU wrapped up a productive few weeks of summer workouts with a group of players that now includes two freshmen and three incoming transfers, but collectively is much more seasoned.
“This summer, our returners have been sharp,” Kielsmeier said. “The defense looks like it’s getting a lot better quickly, and that’s just hard to say when you’ve got so many new players. Our young players now are, I think, are able to learn at a lot quicker level because they’re able to see so many others doing it right instead of just seeing it on film.”
Maples, one of those new players last summer who has since internalized the nuances of how the Vikings operate, agreed.
“Last year, it was like I was re-learning a lot of things, especially with the way we do things here, it was way different than what I was used to,” she said. “This year, coming in knowing the foundation of everything, being able to help people, it’s really been able to make things a lot quicker and smoother because we have a little more experience now. So we’re able to implement it with the newcomers way quicker than last year, because we had more transfers last year. I think that’s really what’s bringing us a lot farther ahead a lot quicker this year.”
“We’re working on things a lot quicker than we’re used to,” Reisma added. “We’re getting into our system quicker, and I think that’s just because he has more faith in us that we’re ready for the system.”
In a lot of ways, the story of Cleveland State’s offseason is that there is no story. The Vikings have largely stuck together, while strategically adding pieces to offset their graduation losses. Along the way, they’ve developed a degree of continuity that has sometimes been lacking during less forgiving times, one they hope shows itself quickly during a demanding non-conference schedule.
It might be a bit boring, but Kielsmeier – as with just about every coach – is perfectly fine with boring when it comes to player movement and development. After all, he trusts his system off the court just as much as he trusts his zone.
“I tell recruits and people that are potential players for our program that we’re different here,” he said. “Everything we say to these kids in the recruiting process is backed up by facts to show them that the likelihood is that this is actually going to happen when you get here.”
“I always think that recruiting is…you’ve gotta minimize risk,” he continued. “There’s risk with choosing a school, no matter where you go. What gives you the best chance to accomplish whatever it is that you want to accomplish? If you check our track record of what we’ve done here at Cleveland State, what’s the likelihood that that’s going to continue to happen? That’s your story. There’s nothing crazy about it, but we have an elite culture with elite people that get things done. That’s facts.”
