As Cleveland State’s starters were introduced prior to Friday’s game in Woodling Gymnasium, the Vikings’ quintet chosen to face Bethune-Cookman first were given t-shirts to toss into the crowd, as a show of fan appreciation.
In turn, Mickayla Perdue, Destiny Leo, Sara Guerreiro, and Macey Fegan each located a friendly face in the stands immediately behind the CSU bench, and lobbed completed passes that were the envy of the local NFL team.
Jordana Reisma, on the other hand, fired her shirt into a row of empty, wooden bleachers seven or eight feet from the nearest human being.
“I really wanted to get it to this one person,” she explained. “But they weren’t looking, so it was just kind of awkward, and I didn’t want to smack them in the face with it, so I just threw it in the general area.”
Though that story of a harmless miscommunication might seem out of place in an article meant to recap Cleveland State’s 78-59 victory over the Wildcats to improve to 8-2 overall, it’s nevertheless notable for being just about the only thing Reisma did wrong during the evening. Forty minutes after the mishap, the Vikings’ woman on the inside had a career-high 25 points, along with seven rebounds and four blocked shots. She also drew seven fouls, and the BCU player primarily responsible for defending her, starting center Kayla Clark, fouled out in the fourth quarter.
The personal-best scoring total was made possible by an 11-for-13 effort from the floor, numbers that will certainly help keep the junior among the national leaders in shooting percentage.
In the big picture, it was merely just the latest entry in what’s undeniably been a breakout season – after all, it was just last week that she equaled her previous career-high points total, with 18 against Northern Kentucky – though Reisma insists that it’s the product of repetition.
“I’ve been here for three years now, and [coach Chris Kielsmeier] has been telling me the same things over and over: ‘You need to get lower, you’ll be successful if you do this,’” she said. “I think I’ve been able to do it more consistently, and it’s showing in the games. He hasn’t had to tell me a lot of things lately, so I feel like I’m doing those things right now.”
“There’s no doubt that she’s always had this talent and potential in her,” Kielsmeier added. “As a young kid, you may not fully believe it or understand what you’re being asked to do. But as long as you keep believing in it, which she always has, the end result is probably going to happen.”
Repetition also proved useful for the Vikings on Friday, when CSU’s efforts to drop the ball down low to Reisma bordered on obsession.
That doesn’t mean they were always successful; particularly in the first half, several attempts to go over the top of the defense were too high even for Reisma’s 6-3 frame and considerable wingspan.
“The timing of it is what most people can’t see,” Kielsmeier said, citing a plodding 14-point second quarter that kept the 2-7 Wildcats unexpectedly close through halftime as a product of bad timing. “When it works, the timing was there. When it doesn’t work, most likely, you either shouldn’t have thrown it, or you missed it, the timing passed. It’s something we’ve got to continue to practice.”
But, if at first you don’t succeed, keep trying to get the ball to your star post player in space.
“I told everybody, we got her 13 shots tonight, and she scored 25 points,” Kielsmeier recalled. “I don’t think she created one of them.”
On a night where Cleveland State’s bench was minimally deployed (those t-shirt tossing starters played 173 minutes and 16 seconds of the 200 minutes available in a regulation game, even with the final 15 of those minutes eaten by reserves once victory was secured), it wasn’t terribly difficult to assign credit for the outcome.
Fegan was particularly dynamic, as she scored 11 points, including the Vikings’ only three-pointer until the late going, though much of her value is generated while opponents possess the basketball.
Kielsmeier often cites the Toledo transfer’s move from the wing to the top of his zone defense as a primary catalyst for his team overcoming some early-season struggles on that end of the floor, and Reisma agrees. In fact, she compares Fegan with Carmen Villalobos, her graduated teammate who was last season’s Horizon League Defensive Player of the Year.
“She’s kind of like Carmen, in a sense,” she said. “You’re not always expecting her to put up big numbers, but defensively, you’re really expecting her to get those rips and rebounds, especially offensively today, she got a lot of offensive rebounds.”
Six offensive rebounds, in fact, along with five assists, three steals and a handful of disruptive players that didn’t fit anywhere on a stat sheet but still affected possession. They’re not the scoring numbers Reisma meant, but they’re certainly big numbers all the same.
“She can affect the game in a variety of ways,” Kielsmeier said.
Perdue added 22 points to the winning effort, with ten of them coming on plays involving made field goals that drew a BCU foul. She bookended the first quarter with a pair of and-ones, then capped things off the night with her typical flair, thanks to a four-point play that transpired right in front of the home bench.
Asianae Nicholson, a South Euclid, OH native whose friends and family made up a disproportionate share of the crowd, paced BCU with 14 points and 12 rebounds. Clark added ten tallies.
Cleveland State will resume Horizon League play on Monday night, when the Vikings travel to Wright State. Tipoff from the Nutter Center is scheduled for 7:00 PM.
