Since becoming a Cleveland State women’s basketball beat writer at the beginning of the 2021-22 season, the Vikings have played 113 official games, and I have attended 105 of them.
I missed the three games of the 2022 Women’s Basketball Invitational because I got COVID that week. During the 2022-23 season, when my vacation time was at a premium, I missed CSU’s upset at DePaul and two games at the Las Vegas Holiday Hoops Classic, a Christmastime multi-team event (MTE). I also had to skip an easy road trip, Akron, because of a final exam in one of my MBA classes. Last year, I missed the chance to see Caitlin Clark in person for my commencement ceremony.
So far, that’s it. There will certainly be others, though I’d like to say that I made it to every game for an entire season at least one time; hopefully that will happen this year.
I’ve driven countless hours to away games, spent a few more sitting in airports, and eaten more than my fair share of solo meals out of Comfort Inn vending machines or, if I’m lucky, the convenience store across the street. During all of that downtime, I still haven’t been able to answer one important, yet seemingly inconsequential, question: why?
It’s not for lack of trying. I thought about it in the TSA line at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport at 7:00 AM on the way to cover CSU in Puerto Rico last week, at least whenever I wasn’t worrying that I’d cut things a bit too close with my departure time. I thought about it again when I had to surrender my water bottle to an agent, after accidentally leaving it half full following the Vikings’ game at Wright State earlier that week. When I landed in San Juan and hadn’t received any sort of confirmation from the owner of the property where I planned to stay, it crossed my mind once again.
Same with the time I ate a hamburger in the New Orleans airport for my Thanksgiving dinner, or when a deer caused thousands of dollars of damage to my car on the way to Iowa State, or when I thought I was going to pass out in the bleachers at IU Indianapolis during a health scare last season, or during the countless times I’ve told someone “sorry, I have a game that day.”
For all the expense, panic, and opportunity cost inherent in all of this, what, exactly, is the payoff? This gig decidedly doesn’t offer a ton of money or prestige. Has the commitment at least made my writing better in some way? I’m skeptical. I could watch the games at home, then talk to Chris Kielsmeier on the phone afterwards, and it’s unlikely that what I’d end up posting would be substantially different. It may even be better, my observations sharper, if I’m given a high television angle on the game, and the help of a play-by-play team’s eyes to pick up things I might miss on my own.
Then again, maybe I’m thinking about it all wrong.
There’s a certain beauty to the Puerto Rico Clasico, or any of the various MTEs, which can best be described as happenings where, despite some cursory effort by organizers, nobody truly expects anyone to show up, save for the teams, the referees, and the necessary courtside personnel.
In Bayamón, the location of the Vikings’ games last week, there were very few of the extras that most people take for granted when watching basketball. For one thing, there were no national anthems or starting lineup introductions. In fact, there was no public address announcer at all. Want to know who just scored? Pay attention. Want a t-shirt? Head to the tourist traps along the shore, because you certainly won’t find one for sale in the Coliseo Rubén Rodríguez. Concessions were absent too, a reality that hit hard when I got back to my room from CSU’s first contest, against Morgan State, and realized that I hadn’t eaten or drank anything all day.
Nevertheless, a few fans do show up. I counted 28 at one game, and 19 at another. There’s generally music – they really, really like Despacito down there – but they sometimes forget to play it during timeouts.
I can’t really say that I was credentialed for the event, because there were no credentials handed out, to me or to anyone else. There was a brief “mention my name at the door” phone conversation with the site manager, a thin, gray-haired man named Peter Sauer, followed by a “sit wherever you want” upon my arrival.
That all results in compelling purity. The arena is often dead silent beyond the voices of the occupants, meaning that you can hear the pregame conversations between the referees and the scorer’s table over whether the venue’s shot clock had a memory function, or the teams’ approval of the game ball’s inflation. You can feel the floor vibrate from each dribble, or the spray from upended cups after Presbyterian’s Laney Scoggins obliterated a trainer’s table pursuing a ball out of bounds in the Blue Hose’s game against Montana State. You can see the tension on Mickayla Perdue’s face as the Bears ratchet up their ball pressure, or Sauer grabbing a mop to clean the area where she subsequently collided with a defender and fell, since they didn’t have anyone else to do it.
Stripped of its usual ceremony, the game is just the game, and the game always has something to reveal.
Still, it’s nearly impossible to be delusional about the competitive aspect of Cleveland State’s trip to Puerto Rico, which involved victories over a bad Division I team and a bad Division II team. That point was thoroughly driven home about 12 hours after the Vikings toyed with a severely-overmatched University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez squad on Saturday. As I endured the scary hours in Terminal B at SJU, prior to my early-morning flight home, I scrolled social media, where it seemed as if the entirety of the women’s basketball world had reacted to the latest game of the year in the sport, a UConn-USC clash earlier that evening.
Even knowing it was an exercise in futility, I humored an impulse by searching for chatter about CSU, or even some of the other games at the Clasico, but gave up after a couple minutes when everything I found was put there by myself or one of the team accounts.
That brought me back to the original question: why? Why did I fly to San Juan to cover 80 fairly unimportant minutes? If I wanted notoriety, I’d have been better served talking about Paige Bueckers and JuJu Watkins like everyone else. If I wanted a good article about Cleveland State, the travel was not required.
Last Thursday, Kielsmeier, who kept his team in the locker room for a full hour after that Wright State game back in Ohio, approached me for our usual Q-and-A after the MSU contest in Puerto Rico within minutes, before I was ready. He and the team were in a hurry to get out of there because they were scheduled to visit Viejo San Juan for dinner that evening.
In that same spirit, the coach consistently deflected basketball questions about the event, both from myself and elsewhere, preferring to talk about the idea of providing his players a lifetime memory, and giving credit to three of his staffers, Hanna Zerr, Chenara Wilson, and Angie Lewis, for their work in planning the trip.
“First off, it’s an experience,” began one such answer. “[The staff] brings some ideas to me, but my message to them is simple: I want an experience, and I want to have [the team] go experience a couple things that they’re talking about 30 or 40 years from now, when this group gets together.”
“It’s kind of a wow factor, you just take it in and experience it, and go ‘wow, this is really, really cool.’”
So, yeah, an experience.
That repeated word was hardly a platitude; following the dinner engagement after their win over the Bears, the Vikings spent a day on the beach, riding jet skis, then taking a boat tour around Bahía de San Juan.
Most of my own experience on the island had clearly not been planned by Zerr, Wilson, and Lewis. As an anxiety-stunted introvert who speaks Sesame Street-level Spanish and is terrified of inconveniencing people (which is how I viewed forcing someone to resort to their second language), I spent my first 36 hours in San Juan doing things like DoorDashing Starbucks. That came shortly after I woke up one morning with a pounding headache, one I quickly diagnosed as caffeine withdrawal after a day of involuntary fasting, followed by a panicked dinner of granola bars and La Croix.
Later I, too, ate a meal after walking around Viejo San Juan…at Burger King. Basically, I entered the place while offering a silent prayer for a touchscreen ordering kiosk that would allow me to avoid speaking to anyone. By the time I realized that there wasn’t one, it was too late, and I had to stumble through asking for the número ocho.
I may get around a fair bit, and the years may have offered me some of the hardened edges required for solo travel, but I’ve never claimed to be Anthony Bourdain. To be frank, I was simply trying to cover a pair of basketball games, survive everything that entailed, and make it home in one piece.
A few hours after I finished the número ocho (a chicken sandwich, if it matters), a friendly guide named Yenifer hopped on to the Vikings’ shuttle bus before the team boarded their tour boat, and asked what they were celebrating.
I had been invited to tag along and thought it kind of a presumptuous question, but before I could reflect on that a ton, a couple people behind me quickly offered a reply: “life.”
Not winning an unexpectedly-tough game against Morgan State the day before. Not the numerous successes that the program has earned over the last five years. Not even the opportunity to play college basketball and go on trips to places like Puerto Rico. Just “life.”
Perfectly reasonable people might interpret that as an “I don’t have a better answer ready” default, I suppose, but I didn’t take it that way. After all, Kielsmeier, when describing players from Perdue, to Kali Howard, to Colbi Maples, will often start by observing that they “love life.” That’s his coded way of explaining people who elevate the program through infectious enthusiasm. Have a bad practice? A fight with your boyfriend? A project due next week? The life lovers will take care of it and, with the sheer force of their personalities, pull their teammates out of the doldrums and put them in a position to get through any tribulation.
That sort of necromancy isn’t limited to the players on the team. Coaches and support staffers get similar energy transfusions from what, in some sense, is a constantly-renewing fountain of youth. It’s a cheat code for people in their 30s and 40s to retain the glow of their younger days, and a certain openness to the world that tends to shut down over time in most people. It even works for burned-out writers wondering why they’re even there, during those fleeting moments when they get close enough to it.
At that moment, on a bus idling near a dock, everyone loved life. Everyone, even towards the end of a long string of adventures laid out for them, was ready for their next quest.
Maybe sometimes the answer to “why” is simply “because you can.”
Whatever the case, the next evening, I confidently walked into a restaurant near my room that had caught my attention, and ordered what turned out to be one of the best pizzas I’ve ever experienced.
Like I said, the game always has something to reveal. It just doesn’t always happen on the court.
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