OCU Contest Added
When Cleveland State’s game at Niagara last month was delayed, then canceled, thanks to illness within the Purple Eagles program, two things were just about certain. The first was that CSU would figure out a way to add some sort of replacement to the schedule, as Chris Kielsmeier abhors playing anything short of the maximum number of games he’s allowed. The second was that the opponent for that game would be from outside of NCAA Division I, for a multitude of reasons.
Thanks to an email and tickets sent out by the Vikings’ ticket office last Friday, we got an answer: CSU will host Ohio Christian, a National Christian College Athletic Association school in Circleville, OH, on Saturday, January 25th at 11:30 AM. The game will be half of a doubleheader with the Vikings men’s team, which hosts Green Bay at 3:00 that afternoon.
Cleveland State formally confirmed the game on Tuesday.
The Trailblazers are 5-7 so far this season, though they lost to Ohio 97-37 a couple weeks ago, their only game against a Division I opponent, so it’s probably fair to expect more of the same at the Wolstein Center next month.
Coincidentally (or perhaps not), the only previous meeting between Cleveland State and OCU was also a replacement game. The Trailblazers trudged up north on December 18th, 2021, after a Vikings contest against Hofstra was wiped out by COVID protocols, and took a 104-51 beating, thanks partly to Gabriella Smith’s 23 points and 17 more from Nadia Dumas. Destiny Leo was the only player on the CSU roster at the time who is still around today, though she didn’t play in the game – the team was in the early stages of its own COVID outbreak, one that would severely hamper its results over the following weeks.
Marking Time
One way to irritate Kielsmeier is to mention when his distribution of playing time gets a little top-heavy, and that was certainly the case last Friday against Bethune-Cookman. Starters Leo, Mickayla Perdue, Jordana Reisma, Sara Guerreiro and Macey Fegan each played at least 33 minutes, and no bench player was on the floor for more than seven. That ratio would’ve been even more lopsided had it not been for a concerted effort to get the reserves on the floor in the last five minutes of a game with a secure outcome.
“I don’t think I’m doing a very good job of [spreading the minutes out],” Kielsmeier said after the game against the Wildcats. “I think I need to sub better. We’ve had good practices with players playing better, and I’ve gotta play them more, and I’ve gotta blame myself [for not playing them].”
Things improved a little bit at Wright State on Monday, with Reisma surrendering 12 post minutes to Mya Moore and Paulina Hernandez, while Filippa Goula spelled the guards (mostly Perdue) for 15 minutes. Still, the overall trend has seen playing time shift up the roster over recent seasons.
In 2022-23, the Vikings boasted nine players who averaged at least 10 minutes per game, while only Leo hit the 30-minute mark. Deja Williams even won the Horizon League’s Sixth Player of the Year award after averaging 6.6 points and 2.0 assists in her 21.9 minutes per game.
Last season, there were eight players on the floor for 10 minutes per game (though one of them was Leo, who was out for most of the year), while both Perdue and Carmen Villalobos topped 30 minutes.
To this point in the current campaign, only the current five starters, plus injured Colbi Maples (a starter when healthy), average over 10 minutes per game. Leo, Perdue and Guerreiro all participate in at least three-quarters of the game.
Fear the Deer
One of the things that I really enjoy about CSU’s weekly radio show (as well as the longer-running men’s version) is that it tends to go a little deeper than similar shows at most schools, or the opportunities I get during a typical media availability. Those are usually limited to the head coach and star players, but the radio show tends to give a microphone to one of the Vikings’ assistant coaches, and often some other overlooked person involved with the program, each week.
On Monday, it was Emily Taylor’s turn, and she gave a thorough rundown of what her position entails.
“Scouting is one big thing,” she began, pointing out that she had the scout for the Wright State game on Monday. “Recruiting, I think, takes up all assistants’ roles. We love recruiting, we love looking for the future, finding the Vikings that are going to help us, propel us, and do all of that. And then we do a lot of the social media stuff behind the scenes. Hannah [Zerr] is great at it with [associate sports information director] Renee [Adam], so we’re working on that.”
“And then one of my favorite duties is just doing developmental stuff with the guards, working on shots, rebounding, any workouts they can do. Definitely why I got into coaching was just being around kids, doing the developmental piece, and the human development too – leadership and life skills. It’s definitely all hands on deck when it comes to that stuff. That would be our main, everyday focus, those five things.”
That’s…a lot. And to make things even more difficult, those aren’t tasks that can often be compartmentalized; coaches can’t ignore recruiting to watch an opponent’s film, for example, everything’s happening all at once.
During a rare bit of respite from one major task, practice, last Wednesday during Cleveland State’s finals week, Kielsmeier and company decided to get out on the road and recruit a little. It didn’t end particularly well for Taylor.
“It was really nice when we left, no snow,” Kielsmeier began.
That wasn’t quite the case when they were ready to make the return trip, as the traveling coaches were each thumped with plenty of the white stuff.
“It was hard travel for all of us getting back,” he continued. “Coach Em, unfortunately, hit a deer, she tore her car up. So we get back in super late Wednesday, or technically, some of us got in on Thursday morning because it was so late and the travel was so hard. But we use those days when we can, because you can’t always have everybody out like that, but with the finals schedule, with it being a lighter week for us game-wise, we were able to send everybody out on the road.”
While Taylor tended to her car (speaking as someone who hit a deer on the way to the Vikings’ game at Iowa State in 2022-23, that’s not a lot of fun, financially or otherwise), Bob Dunn headed right back out, spending most of Saturday and Sunday at a tournament in Washington, DC. He then flew into Dayton in time for CSU’s practice on Sunday evening, ahead of the Wright State game on Monday.
“It’s a little bit hectic, and you have to find a balance with what is too much, because you can recruit so much and make that your focus, but I always want our focus to be our players,” Kielsmeier said. “Whatever our players need, and whatever this current team needs has to be the number one priority.”
Record Pace
When I came up with the idea for these posts, I sort of hoped that there might be a mailbag element to them. Believe it or not, there actually was a submission this week, so let’s close with it.
“I’m wondering what the CSU all-time single season scoring record is, what player holds it, and if Micky is on pace to break that record.” – Jon (@pronkville08), via Twitter
Cleveland State’s single-season record for points is presently held by Shalonda Winton, who put together a phenomenal senior campaign in 2012-13. The Pittsburgh native poured in 659 points in 30 games, which divides out to 22.0 points per game, the eighth-best scoring average in the country that year. Not only that, Winton averaged 10.7 rebounds, making her the most recent Viking to post a full-season double-double.
Despite the presence of players like Winton, Cori Coleman, and Imani Gordon, CSU went just 13-17 a dozen years ago, though they did manage high-major victories over both Indiana and Ole Miss (neither of those programs were quite what they are today).
The points record has faced several credible attacks in recent seasons, most notably by Destiny Leo, who scored 628 times during her Horizon League Player of the Year season in 2022-23. Perdue scored 607 points last year, adding herself to a list of just five CSU hoopers who have topped the 600 mark (early 1980s star Dianne Foster and Kailey Klein, who did it twice, are the others).
Could Perdue score 660 points? Sure. Will she? Possibly, but there’s not a ton of margin for error.
Following Monday night’s game at Wright State, the point guard has 243 points in 11 games this season, an average of 22.1 per outing.
The Vikings have 20 games remaining on the regular season schedule, including the newly-added Ohio Christian contest. So the basic arithmetic is that Perdue needs 417 points in those 20 games, or 20.9 points per game, to break the record during the regular season. That’s obviously a lighter lift than what she’s done to this point.
Of course, CSU will also have at least one game in the Horizon League tournament, and likely more than that. Both last season and in 2022-23, Cleveland State played four games after the regular season schedule. In 2021-22 and 2020-21 the number was six, thanks largely to three games at the WBI to wrap up each of those years.
Each postseason game Perdue plays brings the per-game ask down by nearly a full point. At 21 remaining games, essentially the minimum, she would need 19.9 points per game. If CSU matches the last two seasons and plays four postseason games, the number dips to 17.4.
All of this, of course, assumes good health and the absence of other extenuating circumstances, which is always the challenge when translating napkin math to the real world.
